Last Monday, the interns were able to meet with Dr. Paul Farmer! Dr. Farmer had just returned from a trip to Nepal and he told us a little about his trip; how the notion of a safety net is crucial to our work and that we must implement a rights based framework and public goods for public health. He also spoke about living compassionate justice and how charity is necessary, it's just not the same as social justice. He advised us that we can achieve good outcomes through partnerships and that delivery of basic services to the poor should be considered essential and innovative. He said that "failure of imagination is the biggest failure in public health" and that we must look past the constraints and recognize that so many of these problems are treatable and so many deaths are preventable. 

Besides those presentations and other presentations from the Lesotho team, the monitoring, evaluation and quality team, PIH International Operations, and medical informatics, I have been very busy with my projects. I am now working on two literature reviews: one on service integration and another on active case findings for child immunizations, article summaries (e.g. Countdown to 2015 Building a Future for Women and Children, HIV/AIDS Service Provision in Lesotho: A Baseline Report, and the US Government Evidence Summit: Enhancing Provision and Use of Maternal Health Services through Financial Incentives), writing an article on the need for both preventative and emergency care with regards to the maternal mortality reduction program in Lesotho, putting together an interview form to get patient stories to communications and finalizing the visitor guides that I have been working on this summer.