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I think that looking forward it's easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti.

Paul Farmer

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Paul Farmer
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 26
Anthropologist
Human Rights Activist
Medical Anthropologist
Physician
North Adams
Massachusetts
Think
Haiti
Thinking
Constructive
Forward
Imagine
Looking
Help
Easy
Helping

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In fact, it seems to me that making strategic alliances across national borders in order to treat HIV among the world's poor is one of the last great hopes of solidarity across a widening divide.
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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
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The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.
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For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.
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I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
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Ebola has not yet come into contact with modern medicine in West Africa. But when protocols for the provision of high quality supportive care are followed, the case fatality rate for Ebola may be lower than 20 percent.
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The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they're major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems.
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Equity is the only acceptable goal
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I think, sometimes, that I'm going nuts, and that perhaps there is something good about blocking clean water for those who have none, making sure that illiterate children remain so, and preventing the resuscitation of the public health sector in the country most in need of it. Lunacy is what it is.
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If I am hungry, that is a material problem if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.
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I'm one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat.
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We have to design a health delivery system by actually talking to people and asking, 'What would make this service better for you?' As soon as you start asking, you get a flood of answers.
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What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
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I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully.
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God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. You want to see where Christ crucified abides today? Go to where the poor are suffering and fighting back, and that's where He is.
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The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
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At the same time, it is obvious that clinicians in Haiti are faced with different, and, in fact, greater, challenges when attempting to treat complications of HIV disease.
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You can't have public health without working with the public sector. You can't have public education without working with the public sector in education.
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