One pound, dollar, or euro from each ticket we've sold since 2007 has gone to organisations that work in Haiti, chiefly Partners in Health. This past year ticket buyers have given more than $300,000 to PIH. Our upcoming show in Hyde Park will raise in the realm of £60,000. One point of our trip to Haiti was to see how this money is being used.
Partners in Health works all over the world. In Haiti, PIH and its sister organisation Zanmi Lasante ("Partners in Health" in Creole) employs more than 5,000 Haitians. There are some non-Haitian employees and foreign volunteers – visiting orthopaedic surgeons, engineers – but the vast majority of the doctors and nurses are Haitian, as are the construction workers, janitors, community health workers, secretaries and so on.
One thing I learned was that PIH employs lots of construction wohelrkers. They are building a large teaching hospital in the town of Mirebalais (the biggest construction project begun in Haiti since the earthquake). The main result will be access to high-level medical care for the 140,000 people living in the region, but employment is an intended side effect. Haitians do the construction as far as possible. Where locals are unskilled – in plumbing, electrical wiring, welding – foreign volunteers are brought in to work and help train. John Chew, the project co-ordinator, was excited about how his bricklayers could now read blueprints – a good, marketable skill. When people have jobs, other people can sell them cell phones or, hey, bootlegged DVDs. The economy slowly grows. This is happening not just in Mirebalais but also with smaller clinics and schools PIH is building throughout rural Haiti.
Health, as you might think, is the main concern of PIH. They are known and celebrated for their successful treatment of Aids and TB patients in extremely poor regions. But they take a broad view of health. One employee talked about digitising medical records and seeing several prescriptions for "needs new roof". And these prescriptions had been filled. We met Genevieve Joubert, a nurse who lives and works in the tent camp of Dadadou in Port-au-Prince. She has helped deliver more than 150 babies since the earthquake. But she is also focused on latrines – on the struggle to find someone to build more. And on the more infuriating struggle to get someone to regularly empty them.
The people who work for Partners in Health work there for the same reason any of us would. Some work just because they need a job. Most seem to strongly believe in PIH's vision. The doctors and nurses could get higher pay working for other foreign organisations, or the UN. Many, with foreign graduate degrees, could get jobs any where in the world. Dr Patrick Almazor is from Port-au-Prince and a former Fulbright scholar with a master's degree in public health. He runs the hospital in St Marc, a coastal town where cholera hit particularly hard last year. He'd started with PIH because of a mandatory year of service post-medical school. He'd stayed because he realised he wanted to serve the poor, and he found working with PIH was the best way to do that.
PIH are breathtakingly competent. I would describe them as efficient, but that might imply a focus on cost-effectiveness and the system, instead of on the patient. I'd rather say that PIH are thorough in all aspects of operation and wise in their use of money and supplies. They are part of a strong, organic movement towards a functioning society in Haiti.
For more information on Partners in Health, go to pih.org/
