The Legacy of the Zanmi Lasante Clinic

Another purpose of The Legacy Movement blog will also be to tell of the legacies that others have left behind. Many of these people are ordinary people coming from ordinary backgrounds, but what set them apart was the vision they saw to improve the world around them and their determination to let nothing stop them from making that vision become reality.

One such person is Dr. Paul Farmer. Many people living in the US grew up with more than Paul had in his childhood. He spent much of his childhood living in a bus with his six other siblings and mother and father. In spite of his upbringing (or perhaps because of it), Farmer dedicated his life to the fight against poverty. After working his way through Harvard Medical School, he founded Partners in Health and helped raise the money to build the Zanmi Lasante Clinic in Haiti. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and its people live in fear of crime and oppression. Farmer spent the next several years splitting his time between working in the States to pay his bills and building up the Zanmi Lasante Clinic from scratch. Since its inception in 1987, the Zanmi Lasante Clinic has reduced infant mortality and malnutrition dramatically, vaccinated all the children in its area, and built schools, houses, and water/sanitation systems in the neighborhood. The most amazing thing is that Partners in Health has brought tuberculosis infection to a standstill on the island.

Fmr. President Bill Clinton wrote about Dr. Farmer in his book Giving and asked him why he didn’t simply volunteer a couple weeks out of the year and spend the rest of his time working for his own benefit. Paul’s answer was that even while he grew up in hard conditions, his parents were always concerned about those who were even worse off than they were and showed as much generosity as they could afford. The families he met in Haiti lived in conditions that made his bus look like a palace. Paul wanted to empower the people he met in Haiti with the same medical conditions available in America, and his vision resulted in changing the way health care works in an entire country. That is the kind of legacy that one person with a vision can leave on the world.

Dr. Paul Farmer is now in Rwanda implementing his Partners in Health model and leaving a legacy there.