Where They Need Me - by Pierre Minn (Paperback)

About the Book

"This book focuses on the work of Haitian health professionals in humanitarian aid encounters. Haitian doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other health care workers act as intermediaries between actors from the global North (the United States, Canada and Europe) and Haiti's majority population, many of whom do not have access to decent care. This book address the reasons why international aid in Haiti suffers from a lack of coordination and some of the reasons why certain interventions succeed while others fail"--

Book Synopsis

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

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