Where They Need Me: Local Clinicians and the Workings of Global Health in Haiti

by Pierre Minn

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501763878
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	09/15/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Logic of Uncoordination
2. "Working Together for Health" at the Hôpital Universitaire Justinien
3. Between a Fund and a Hard Place
4. Components of a Moral Economy
5. Saints, Villains, and Champions
Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Peter Redfield

Simply put, Where They Need Me is a first-rate contribution to medical anthropology and social medicine. In refreshingly clear and accessible prose, Pierre Minn gently reminds us that cross-border connections are complex, varied, and run in more than one direction. His case study fulfills its title, at once carefully located and richly relevant to wider debates about global health.

Ramah McKay

Well-written and thoughtful, Where They Need Me paints a moving and provocative portrait of international medical aid in Haiti.

Claire Wendland

Bringing to life French, English and Haitian Creole conversations in hospitals across Haiti, Where They Need Me perceptively examines the day-to-day exchanges that make up transnational medical humanitarian practices.