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Social Science Physical

Where They Need Me

Local Clinicians and the Workings of Global Health in Haiti

by (author) Pierre Minn

Publisher
Cornell University Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2022
Category
Physical, Public Health, Haiti
Recommended Age
18
Recommended Grade
12
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781501763854
    Publish Date
    Sep 2022
    List Price
    $33.95
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781501763847
    Publish Date
    Sep 2022
    List Price
    $168.95

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Description

Where They Need Me examines the work of Haitian health professionals in humanitarian aid encounters. Haiti is the target of an overwhelming number of internationally funded health projects. While religious institutions sponsor a number of these initiatives, many are implemented within the secular framework of global health. Pierre Minn illustrates the divergent criteria that actors involved in global health use to evaluate interventions' efficacy.

Haitian physicians, nurses, and administrative staff are hired to carry out these global health programs, distribute or withhold resources, and produce accounts of interventions' outcomes. In their roles as intermediaries, Haitian clinicians are expected not only to embody the humanitarian projects of foreign funders and care for their impoverished patients but also to act as sources of support for their own kin networks, while negotiating their future prospects in a climate of pronounced scarcity and insecurity. In Where They Need Me, Minn argues that a serious consideration of these local health care providers in the context of global health is essential to counter simplistic depictions of clinicians and patients as heroes, villains, or victims as well as to move beyond the donor-recipient dyad that has dominated theoretical work on humanitarianism and the gift.

About the author

Contributor Notes

Pierre Minn is Associate Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Social and Preventive Medicine at the Université de Montréal.