According to the World Health Organization, ninety percent of Haiti’s children suffer from waterborne diseases and intestinal parasites. Half of the children in Haiti are unvaccinated and just 40% of the population has access to basic health care. Even before the 2010 earthquake, nearly half the causes of deaths have been attributed to preventable diseases like malaria, TB and diarrheal diseases. 30,000 people in Haiti suffer each year from malaria, and according to the Haitian Group for the Study of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections (GHESKIO), cases of tuberculosis (TB) in Haiti are more than ten times as high as those in other Latin American countries. Even today, the majority of Haitians receive no formal education, and only a small minority are educated beyond primary school. According to the US Agency for International Development, of Haiti's 9.4 million inhabitants, the literacy rate of 70.9% is the lowest in the region. The enrollment rate for primary school is as low as 19% in rural parts of the country, and fewer than 30% country-wide reach 6th grade. Secondary schools enroll 20% of eligible-age children.

I’m striving to be more than just a physician. I want to be an advocate for human rights, a voice for those whose voice goes unheard and a face for the poorest of the poor. I don’t imagine myself in a hospital or in a lab. I’m interested in political medicine, changing policy, the way medicine is practiced, the way it is distributed, and how it is defined. I believe in a universal standard of care available to all.

The mission of my work is to improve the health of rural Haitians and the death toll imposed on them by the constraints of poverty. My goals are to mobilize communities in Haiti by empowering Haitians to take control over their own health. Through education, I am equipping them with the tools they need to save their own lives. These efforts are most important in rural Haiti where there are few if no doctors and where the people themselves are there own medical community. The goals are to educate Haitian youth to become leaders in their own communities as trained community health workers by collaborating with non-profits committed to improving the health of Haitians. Using several medical texts and drawing largely on the expertise of doctors both in and out of Haiti, I designed a 3-month public health training course to develop a working public health team of youth. The program has since graduated 16 young adults. As community health workers, they have helped teach health education classes for thousands of villagers, perform mass treatment programs for scabies and ringworm, and administer TB and malaria medications using directly-observed therapy, among many other things. Aside from engaging the community in public health issues, and providing sustainable methods of treatment for hundreds of people, these youth have become leaders in their communities and looked upon with incredible respect. Their work is inspiring to their peers as can be seen in the long list of young adults waiting for their chance to join the public health group. The organization that I will be working with next is Hope For Haiti (H4H). H4H is an organization who’s mission I identify very closely with and who I believe would be the perfect place to begin offering public health education and training reaching out to all of the clinics and schools that the organization supports. To learn more about H4H, visit hopeforhaiti.com My short-term goals include working with Hope For Haiti staff in identifying the areas in which can be strengthened with programs in preventative medicine education. My other goals include continued fundraising and mobilization of the Brown community. To identify doctors, public health and medical students interested in working in Haiti as teaching staff for the public health training program. My long-term goals include identifying key partnerships with other organizations throughout Haiti, while focusing efforts on Hope For Haiti which can benefit from the strengths of the public health program, both in regards to the training and employment of community health workers. The Global Health Initiative at Brown Medical School has committed to supporting my continued work in Haiti with small travel grants so that I may continue to have an active presence in Haiti while still in medical school. My immediate goal for the public health program is to identify the parts that are adaptable to other regions in Haiti. The program I have already developed and the team that I have trained is specific to the southwestern region. For this reason, Hope For Haiti, whose presence is great in the region, would aid in spreading the importance of education as a means of preventative medicine, to over a dozen villages. My training program is the only one like it in the southwestern region of the country and has quickly become a model for public health education. Recognizing that prevention is by far the most cost-effective and sure way of eliminating the diseases endemic to this country and the unnecessary deaths that are the result, I am working to introduce the program to every region of the country. By teaching local volunteers information about a variety of issues including hygiene, sanitation, nutrition, and water quality, along with testing, treatment, and prevention strategies aimed at reducing the incidence of diseases common in the area, countless lives are being saved and communities of people are being empowered.

Visit willinhaiti.org and hopeforhaiti.com to learn more