Dartmouth president Jim Yong Kim offers ways to help Haiti
KoreAm
Author: KoreAm
Posted: February 2nd, 2010
Filed Under: BLOG , Back Issues , FEATURED ARTICLE , February 2010
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Photos courtesy of UN Photo/Marco Dormino

By Karin Fischer

Dartmouth College is one of several American universities to announce it is sending faculty members with medical and global health expertise to Haiti to help with relief efforts following last month’s devastating earthquake.

But the Ivy League institution’s president, Jim Yong Kim, may be unusual among higher education leaders in the depth of his ties to the impoverished Caribbean nation.

Dr. Kim, who became Dartmouth’s president in July, is a co-founder and former executive director of Partners in Health, a nonprofit organization that supports health programs in poor communities worldwide. The global health group has worked to provide medical services to the poorest Haitians for more than 20 years and is one of the main organizations on the ground treating those injured in the earthquake. Its co-founder, Paul Farmer, was appointed in August as deputy to former President Bill Clinton, the United Nations’ special envoy to Haiti.

The following are excerpts from a conversation with Dr. Kim.

You’ve been to Haiti some two dozen times through your work with Partners in Health. Could you talk about your experience?
I first went to Haiti in 1988, and it was a shocking experience for me. I had been to a lot of different places before, but I had never seen a place that was just so deeply poor. When I first went there, in the first walk that I took to one of the small villages that we served, I felt like I was walking on the face of the moon. The entire area had been deforested, and it had been deforested because the last line of income production for people who are so poor is to cut down trees and make charcoal. Since then I’ve traveled all over the world in my work in Partners in Health, in my work in the World Health Organization, and to this day I have never seen a place as tragic as Haiti. Continue Reading »

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