📍Zanmi Lasante Hospital, Cange, Haiti
1983 – 2022“I first went to Haiti in 1983 as a young Harvard medical student, and what I found in the Central Plateau — specifically in the village of Cange in the Artibonite valley — determined the rest of my life. Cange was one of the poorest places on earth: no clean water, no sanitation, rampant tuberculosis and HIV, children dying of diseases that cost pennies to treat. I co-founded Zanmi Lasante — Partners in Health — and spent the next decades building a hospital and community health system that treated the poor not as passive recipients of charity but as people with the same right to quality medical care as anyone in Boston or Paris. I commuted between Harvard and Haiti for years, sleeping on planes, living between two worlds, trying to apply the resources of one to the needs of the other. Cange was always where I felt most real.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Kidder, T. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer (2003), Random House; Farmer, P. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor (2003), University of California Press