Paul Farmer

It was one summer in Florida, in the citrus groves.

A family of eight was picking citrus alongside workers from Haiti. Among the children was a boy named Paul Farmer.

It was his first encounter with Haitians. It would not be his last.

He had been born on October 26, 1959, in North Adams, Massachusetts. For five years, in Brooksville, Florida, his family lived in a converted school bus. Then on a boat, in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1982, he graduated from Duke University with the highest honours, in medical anthropology.

The following year, he went to Haiti. In Cange, he helped start a community-based health project.

During his medical training, he lived in Haiti, among poor farmers.

In 1987, with Jim Yong Kim, Ophelia Dahl, Thomas J. White and Todd McCormack, he co-founded Partners In Health.

In 1990, he earned a medical degree and a doctorate in medical anthropology at Harvard. In 1996, he completed training in infectious diseases at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in Boston.

His idea was simple. After his death, a colleague, Victor Dzau, summed it up this way: you can bring the best care to anybody, starting with the poor and underserved.

His work drew on the "preferential option for the poor."

In Haiti, he helped bring HIV and AIDS drugs to patients. He opened a hospital there.

In Peru, from 1994, in Carabayllo, he applied the same model. In 1996, the program took on drug-resistant tuberculosis.

In 1993, he had received a MacArthur fellowship.

In August 2009, he became United Nations deputy special envoy for Haiti. In 2013, the Mirebalais University Hospital opened its doors.

In Rwanda too, he had opened a hospital. In 2015, the University of Global Health Equity began. In 2019, its Butaro campus welcomed its first medical students.

He became its chancellor.

He spent his last days in Butaro. On February 21, 2022, he died there of a cardiac event. He was 62.

On March 12, 2022, he was honoured at a memorial in Boston.

His way of caring echoes Ubuntu, without being the same: the best care is owed to everyone, starting with the poorest.

He had begun in a grove, among Haitian pickers.

He ended in Butaro, Rwanda, where students were learning to heal.