By Patrick Cole
Feb. 28 (Bloomberg) -- When Paul Farmer watched friends in Haiti die from inadequate medical care in 1983, he vowed to return and improve the system.
He kept his promise. Farmer estimates that Partners in Health, the nonprofit clinics he co-founded in 1987, has provided health-care services to about 10 million poor people in Haiti, Africa and South America afflicted with AIDS, malaria and other life-threatening diseases.
His work has earned him the $100,000 Austin College Leadership Award for humanitarian work. The Sherman, Texas-based liberal arts college will present the award to him tomorrow.
``I'm proud that we stuck with it in rural Haiti,'' Farmer, a professor of medical anthropology at Harvard Medical School, said in a phone interview. ``With all the troubles in Haiti, we never closed our doors.''
In the 1980s, Farmer said, some of his health-care workers and their patients were kidnapped and killed under the brutal regime of Jean-Claude ``Baby Doc'' Duvalier.
``His willingness to risk his life to reach out to the children of Haiti was very moving to me,'' Austin College President Oscar Page said about Farmer.
The award, now in its second year, began with a $2 million donation by Lee Posey, chairman emeritus of Palm Harbor Homes Inc. in Dallas, a maker of factory-built homes.
``He appears to have almost single-handedly created a public health system,'' Posey said. ``That was the thing that was so impressive to me.''
Tracy Kidder Subject
The Boston-based organization, with a budget of $28 million and about 4,000 workers, operates in nine countries, including Rwanda, Guatemala, Lesotho and Malawi. In addition to providing health-care services and medication, Partners in Health assigns neighbors, friends of patients and sometimes family members to monitor their medication and report their progress to doctors.
Author Tracy Kidder chronicled Farmer's work in his book ``Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World'' (Random House, 2003).
Austin College chose Farmer from a list of candidates that included Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, and Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center and its chief trial lawyer.
A Lifesaver
Farmer is not a stranger to awards. He won a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation ``genius'' grant in 1993 and the $1.5 million Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize in 2005. He also received a Heinz Award for the Human Condition three years ago for his work in Haiti.
``To say that Dr. Paul Farmer is a lifesaver does not begin to describe the impact of his work,'' Teresa Heinz, chairwoman of the Heinz Endowments, said in a statement. Partners in Health is ``a force in making the world confront the health-care needs of those who have historically never had access to proper care,'' she said.
Partners in Health has received about $44 million in grants since its inception from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Farmer said. More than half of the organization's funding comes from private donors.
Farmer said the Austin College award money will be used to hire engineers, more reading teachers for children and adults, and construction workers to build more clinics, housing and hospitals.
``We're also trying to put together capital so that if anything happens in the countries that we're working, we wouldn't have to stop the work,'' he said.
First-Hand Experience
Farmer knows about poverty first-hand. Born in North Adams, Massachusetts, and raised in Brooksville, Florida, he grew up in a converted school bus with eight family members and on a boat near a dock. Both homes had no running water.
``I'm not so sure that what I grew up in was poverty now,'' Farmer said. ``It's not like we ever went hungry. We never missed a meal. One of my brothers is a pro wrestler, and you should see him; you wouldn't think of him as one who had been hungry.''
Farmer attended Duke University on a scholarship to study medical anthropology -- how the history and culture of an ethnic group can influence medical treatment. During his undergraduate years, he worked in the emergency room at Duke University Medical Center's hospital.
``That experience showed me what kind of doctor I wanted to be,'' said Farmer, who graduated from Harvard Medical School.
Farmer, who is married to anthropologist Didi Bertrand, said he spends nearly half the year traveling to the countries where Partners in Health provides care. (Co-founder Jim Yong Kim continues to work with him.)
Farmer said he wants to make sure the program is working in each location, even though he has a staff that runs the operation and he realizes he can't monitor every detail.
``I worry a lot,'' he said. ``It can keep you up all night.''
To contact the reporter on this story: Patrick Cole in New York at pcole3@Bloomberg.net.
