Looking for hockey coverage, I came across an excellent Boston Globe feature on David Farmer, a Boston doctor who set up a free hospital in one of the Rwandan regions hardest hit by the 1994 genocide that killed 800,000 people, mostly by machete.
Farmer, who teaches at Harvard, was taken to Ruhengeri, in the country’s northwest corner. But there was already a clean hospital there, with employees and even an X-ray machine. “No, no, no. You don’t understand,” Farmer recalls saying. “Find me the worst possible place in the country.”
So they took him to Rwinkwavu, a remote area two hours east of Kigali. Even Farmer - who works in the world’s worst regions - was taken aback. The “hospital” consisted of derelict buildings that had been used by a Belgian mining company decades earlier, then as military barracks during the genocide in which 800,000 people were killed in 100 days. Bullet holes pocked the walls, which were also scarred with hate messages left by the killers: “Those we don’t kill, AIDS will get.”
There were no beds, no patients, no staff, no medical equipment. “It was abandoned, dirty and scary,” Farmer says. There were 200,000 people in the district and not a single doctor.
It was the perfect place for Farmer.
Today Farmer’s hospital sees 250 patients a day, and a second similar one has been built in another equally remote, desolate part of Rwanda, with plans for a third on the way. Farmer co-founded Partners in Health, a no-holds-barred international NGO that does “whatever it takes, from pressuring drug manufacturers, to lobbying policy makers, to providing medical care and social services.”
The group’s goal is to improve lives and set up health facilities where they’re needed most, usually out in the rural areas of the developing world. Outside of Rwanda, it runs hospitals and clinics in Russia, Lesotho, Malawi, Haiti, Peru, and even Boston, where it serves the city’s “sickest and most marginalized” HIV sufferers.
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More from the Globe:
In the middle of the hospital grounds is a fish pond, a Farmer trademark at all Partners clinics. He and his brother Jeff, a former professional wrestler, dug this pond themselves, wading into swamps for plants and fish. Farmer says it’s about providing dignity and something of beauty to the poor.
[…] The 96-bed hospital includes a pediatrics and a malnutrition ward, operating room, women’s clinic, radiology, pharmacy, dental clinic, lab, and a lively center for children with HIV/AIDS. […] Partners is by far the biggest employer in their local areas: 1,500 so far, including 825 community health workers.
“Good things happen when you create jobs,” Farmer says. The accompagnateurs, some of them HIV-infected themselves, can now support their own families. And the visits are healing, Farmer believes: “It’s not so much about supervising as it is about being neighborly.”
“Neighborly” is a loaded word in this country, where the majority Hutu butchered the Tutsi and moderate Hutu during the genocide. Neighbors killed neighbors, teachers and students killed each other, workers killed co-workers, doctors killed patients, priests killed parishioners - and vice versa. Many Partners staffers are Tutsi, while most of the patients, because they comprise 85 percent of the population, are Hutu. Thus, many Tutsi workers are treating Hutu patients and, under the housing program, building homes for Hutu families.
Annoyingly, free registration seems to be required to read the the last of the article’s five pages, but the first four are great. It’s stuff like this that made me want to be a reporter.
Photo from Partners in Health.
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