Video: Partners in Health gives shelter

From Partners in Health, a video about a housing project in Rwanda.

Introducing Overnight Links for December 8th

One of the struggles we constantly have with this blog is trying to do more posts than we already do. Since we do this on sort of a volunteer basis we seem to only get to three or four posts a day. That means there are some relevant stories that don't get linked to on the blog. Most of the stories that we miss are the ones that break during the overnight hours.

To try to remedy this, we will start each day with a digest form post of the overnight stories. A brief sentence will summarize the story which will accompany a link to read the entire story. We hope that by doing this, that we can become a more thorough source of stories regarding poverty. So here we go...

First, a gruesome Associated Press story that we found at KXAN-TV, deals with serial rapists stalking women in Somali refugee camps.

The Partners in Health blog has this video about bringing health care to Liberia.

Inter Press Service another story on the conflict between lack of government funding and efforts to improve health. Writer Souleymane Faye says that Senegal is facing cutbacks to a community material health program called Bajenu Gox.

She battles disease, poverty in developing countries

from the Boston Globe

By Billy Baker

Dr. Joia Mukherjee really wants to be a singer. That, she has already decided, will be her second career, and she just has to finish her first career, this minor business of "getting all the world's HIV and poverty squared away," before she can get started in earnest.

"I brought a karaoke machine to Haiti last week," Mukherjee said recently in her office on Huntington Avenue, though her smile turns into a smirk when she notes that she never got to use it. She was too busy saving lives as the medical director for Partners in Health, a Boston-based organization dedicated to fighting poverty and healthcare inequality in impoverished countries.

In one single hour in Haiti, she said, the organization saved the lives of five children who would have died of malnutrition had they not been there to feed them some specially fortified peanut butter. Karaoke had to wait, though her face brightens again when she adds that she did get to lead a song for the president of Haiti.

Mukherjee is almost impossibly laid back as she tells such stories, a quality that, she says, is often maddening for her staff.

"It drives people crazy to see how low-key I am," she said. Her temperament is constant - playful, curious or, in her words, "quirky" - whether she's talking about fighting malaria or how unfair it is that she's too old, at 44, to be on "American Idol."

"Whenever I see her," said Jack Bryant, a former dean of the school of public health at Columbia University who has been doing work in Haiti for decades, "she has this intriguing quality of being both light-hearted and profound. She's an important person in the field of international health and development, but at the same time she doesn't grumble all the time."

Mukherjee says that she can be so pleasant about the unpleasant because the fight has been with her so long that it's just a part of who she is now. In 1972, when she was an 8-year-old girl growing up in suburban Long Island, her family took her to India. Her father, from Bangladesh, is a refugee from the India-Pakistan partition in the mid-50s (her mother is Irish-Catholic with red hair and freckles), and they arrived in the country at a time of great turmoil, when Bangladesh was separating from Pakistan and millions of people were being displaced.

She saw the squalid conditions of poverty. She saw kids her own age dying in the street. She saw people with leprosy. And she was outraged.

"I think children have a strong sense of social injustice," she said, "and I was never the same kid after that."

In the eighth grade, she read a Nelson Mandela speech that pointed to poverty as the root of the world's problems and decided, then and there, that would be her cause. When the AIDS epidemic broke during her college years, she realized it would disproportionately affect the poor, and she went to medical school intent on working on diseases of poverty. She spent six months in Kenya during her medical training, and, after that, she found it hard to work in the United States.

"I saw 50 kids die of malnutrition in Kenya, and came back and worked on a kid's heart transplant. I was glad to help the [American] child, and he deserved it, but it was all this work for one when a few dollars could have saved many. After that, I decided that the US had enough doctors and didn't need me."

Mukherjee, who is also on the staff at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, now spends 75 percent of her time traveling abroad with her karaoke machine and her 22-month-old son, Che, as she helps to supervise Partners' efforts in 10 countries. The single mother trains local staff and works with governments to help establish national health networks, all with the goal of pushing forth the belief that healthcare is a basic human right.

Raise prophetic voices against poverty, Paul Farmer tells bishops

from Episcopal Life

Medical anthropologist underscores importance of achieving MDGs
By Mary Frances Schjonberg

Medical anthropologist Paul Farmer told the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops September 21 that the church's prophetic voice must be heard in the global debates about the most effective ways to eradicate extreme poverty and guarantee basic rights to all.

"When the churches are united around social justice issues, it's very powerful," he said. "It's hard to shout down a bishop."

Farmer, also a physician, is a founding director of Partners in Health, an international charity organization that provides direct health care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. He is on the staff of Harvard University's Department of Social Medicine. Farmer's work focuses on diseases that disproportionately afflict the poor.



Farmer told the bishops that they know as much about the MDGs as anyone because they are called to preach and follow the imperatives of Matthew 25:31-46. He led them through a comparison of how he sees Jesus' admonitions to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, to visit the sick and those in prison, and to bury the dead being carried out in Haiti, Rwanda and New Orleans.

Farmer's comparisons grew out of his work in Haiti and Rwanda. He described having left New Orleans for Rwanda after delivering a speech just days before Hurricane Katrina devastated the city and the Gulf Coast. "I found myself having to explain Katrina to my African hosts," whom Farmer said could not believe that such scenes were playing out in the United States.

In each of the corporal works of mercy named in Matthew's gospel, Farmer told the bishops that privatization of services has led to profit rather than accomplishment of Jesus' instructions.

Oregon Bishop Johncy Itty summarized Farmer's point during a question-and-answer session as being "for good or for bad, poverty is profitable."

Farmer urged the bishops to use their prophetic voices to drum up grassroots interest in the policy issues that have led to such a situation. He noted that policy work is "the least sexy, the least attractive part" of helping alleviate the problems described by the MDGs.

However, a meeting such as that of the House of Bishops "offers us an opportunity to take stock of the issues of our times," he said.

"When your voices echo the aspirations of the people we serve, it is not trivial," Farmer said.

Rather, it gives those who work "at the granular level" a real sense of being supported in their efforts.

Churches should call society to confront uncomfortable questions, such as whether the large development efforts now going on in the world are effective.

"People with a prophetic voice need to say that the development machinery is flawed," he said. "The whole machinery needs an overhaul."

The flaws in the machinery include the fact that not all development agencies are "big, honest and not corrupt," Farmer said. That fact needs to be named, described and taught about because too many who are involved with development efforts are reluctant to do so for fear that naming the flaw will cause donors to stop contributing to development work.

Farmer also said that churches also must be willing to confront the implications of conducting private relief and development efforts which do not strengthen the public sectors of the communities in which they take place. Such private efforts, while laudable, are flawed if they don't also attempt to build up the public sector's ability to fulfill its role of being what Farmer called the "final guarantor" of basic rights.

"If we fail to support the public sector … we are going to undermine the aspirations of the people we serve," he said.

Tracy Kidder has profiled Farmer in his book, "Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World." In the book, Kidder describes what Farmer learned during his work with an Episcopal priest in Haiti about the place faith plays in transforming people's lives.

Farmer is a member of the United Nations Millennium Project's Task Force Working Group on HIV/AIDS. The project's goal was to "to develop a concrete action plan for the world to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and to reverse the grinding poverty, hunger and disease affecting billions of people," according to its website.

The Episcopal Church's 75th General Convention made the MDGs a budget priority. Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has said that the Episcopal Church champions the MDGs as a path toward restorative justice "because it seems to be the best global example of what the Reign of God could look like in our own day."

She and others have warned that the MDGs only aim to go halfway toward alleviating the problems of extreme poverty.

Jefferts Schori closed the session underscoring that prophetic voices in eradicating poverty and achieving the other MDGs is central to the Christian life.

-- The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is national correspondent for the Episcopal News Service.