Read Online Haiti After the Earthquake by Paul Farmer - Free Book Online

who politely termed himself “a personal protection agent”). Clinton counseled me to focus on two broad agendas: the medical and public health issues I knew best but also the economic issues that influenced who got sick and who did not. I later learned that my trip had merited press coverage in the Miami Herald:
    A prominent Harvard doctor and Haiti advocate completed his first visit to the Caribbean nation Tuesday in his new capacity as the United Nations’ deputy special envoy.
    Paul Farmer made the five-day visit as part of a follow-up trip that UN Special Envoy Bill Clinton made last month to Haiti, which suffered extensively last year because of back-to-back storms, food riots and a nearly five-month political crisis. The trip’s goal: gauge how best to support the Haitian government in its national recovery plan.
    During his visit, Farmer met with Haitian President René Préval and Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis and other government officials, as well as with business leaders and representatives from the UN and nongovernmental organizations. Farmer also visited the Central Plateau region and Cap Haïtien, Haiti’s second largest city, where he met with local leaders and tourism officials. 20
    This all sounded good, and I believed in the mission. Haiti had a terrible reputation internationally for dozens of reasons, most of them wrong. But it wasn’t possible to claim that anti-Haitian propaganda was based purely on fantasy. After the public meetings mentioned in the press, I dragged the UN security team to visit the widow of a friend and colleague. Our lead surgeon, Dr. Josué
Augustin, had been murdered in Hinche on August 31. (Although I struggled to believe it was murder, and not an accident, what meager forensic evidence we had was clear enough.) It was impossible to begin a cheerleading campaign for Haiti as a safe place to invest when a protégé had been killed that same week. I wrote a eulogy for Josué:
    All of us are still reeling from the loss of Josué Augustin, whom we have known as student, intern, resident, colleague, and friend. Above all, we knew him as Dr. Josué, a level-headed and thoughtful surgeon and the driving force behind our collective efforts to make sure that surgery did not remain the “neglected stepchild” of our work in Haiti. Josué combined a rigorous pragmatism with a broad vision of what could be done to improve complex medical services, and surgery especially, in settings in which such endeavors are too often dismissed as impractical, not cost-effective, or even (absurdly enough) unnecessary. What this meant in terms of everyday practice was that he was there to round on patients, to scrub in, to organize a team of people (many of them from rural Haiti, others from far away) to provide care to those who would otherwise not have it. What this meant in terms of his own agenda was that he was always willing to engage people from all over the world (and especially from the United States and Cuba) who believed in his mission. It meant he was willing to go to where the pathology was, whether that meant Cange, Boucan Carré, Saint-Marc, Belladères, Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite, Lascahobas, or Hinche, where he was taken from us, and from his family and patients, just last week. What this means for us, beyond our grief, is that we must fight hard to make sure that Josué’s vision of equitable surgical services for the poor is one that remains front and center, not just in Haiti but in those other regions, regions full of people in need, too readily written off as unsuitable for surgery. We honor Josué by making sure that such an important mission outlives him or any other one person.

    Although uncomfortable with the heavy protocol, which was often completely over the top, I settled into a good working relationship
with the UN Haiti team. This group of eight or so people led a staff of several thousand,