Austin College Students for Partners in Health, or ACPIH, began as the idea of Kenan Ince, current Austin College freshman, after reading Tracy Kidder's Farmer biography Mountains beyond Mountains. Paul Farmer's inspiring tale of one man's journey to make a difference resounded within Kenan and several other incoming AC students. Using the Facebook network, they recruited over 80 other students who felt the same way. Starting with Kenan's $75 donation, they are now working to raise money for Farmer's cause.
Paul Farmer was a premedical student at Duke when he encountered the terrible working conditions of Haitian immigrants to the US. As he researched the developing country, he began to realize more and more the need for extreme action. Huge numbers of Haitians were suffering from diseases that the First World had long eradicated. After graduating from Duke, Farmer moved to rural Haiti and built a health clinic from scratch known as Zanmi Lasante, Partners in Health in Haitian Kreyol. It became a resounding success, greatly improving the quality of health for an entire village. In 1987, he founded Partners In Health to address the problems he found on a larger scale, which by then included schools, clinics, a training program for health outreach workers, a mobile unit that screens residents of area villages for preventable diseases, and an ongoing study of sickness and health among the peasants of rural Haiti. PIH currently works in Haiti, Russia, the USA, Rwanda, Lesotho, Guatemala, Peru, and Mexico to bring not only health care but social justice to the masses.
Tracy Kidder describes him best: "And I was drawn to the man himself. He worked extraordinary hours. In fact, I don’t think he sleeps more than an hour or two most nights. Here was a person who seemed to be practicing more than he preached, who seemed to be living, as nearly as any human being can, without hypocrisy. A challenging person, the kind of person whose example can irritate you by making you feel you’ve never done anything as important, and yet, in his presence, those kinds of feelings tended to vanish. In the past, when I’d imagined a person with credentials like his, I’d imagined someone dour and self-righteous, but he was very friendly and irreverent, and quite funny. He seemed like someone I’d like to know, and I thought that if I did my job well, a reader would feel that way, too."
If you would like to make a donation (and we would be eternally grateful if you did), please click here. All donations will be posted on the Donations page, so please send e-mail notification and a receipt to Kenan.