HEALING VISIONARIES | 21
Proving the Possible Three healing visionaries open new realms By Jennifer Margulis
The Quiet Giant
Viaud’s community-based approach to
Loune Viaud, Haiti | From a nation plagued with poverty, a woman with a tonic for transforming global public health.
O ©Maciek Dakowicz | maciekda@hotmail.com
n an eight-hour drive from Cange, a remote village in Haiti’s Central Plateau, to the Dominican Republic, two women talk quietly. They talk about the history of the two nations, the passing countryside, and the treatment for advanced cervical cancer that 43 year-old Marjorie is undergoing. The treatment for her stage of cancer is not yet available in Haiti, so Loune Viaud, Director of Strategic Planning and Operations and the Drug Procurement Officer at Cange’s Hôpital Bon Sauveur, is accompanying Marjorie on her journey. For Viaud, these intimate moments are as essential to her work as the agenda she is planning for a global conference on cervical cancer later this week—testament to the increasing recognition of Viaud’s innovation and impact.
As a woman on the forefront of the fight for access to health care for all Haitians, Viaud already faces an uphill battle, but as instability and violence worsen in Haiti, her job keeps getting harder. But if anyone is up for the challenge of bringing health to Haiti, it’s Viaud. There is a reason her colleagues call her “the quiet giant.” At 5’1” tall, 40-year-old Viaud is soft-spoken and unassuming. Yet she has created access to health care for thousands of Haiti’s poorest of the poor while at the same time empowering them to overcome poverty. Her convictions— that health is a fundamental human right for all people, and that poverty is best combated when people are aware of this right—have remained the same since she first started working on behalf of Haiti’s poor when she was a teenager.
epidemic disease and to the lack of basic services has been replicated in urban Peru, inner-city Boston, and even Siberia.
“It is a ground-breaking approach that Loune is using in Cange,” says Monika Kalra, Legal and Program Officer at the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights. “Patients are respected and treated as rights-holders. You can see this in the way Loune works with them and the respect and love they have for her.” Until 15 years ago, you could not find Cange on any maps in Haiti. The village was nothing more than a squatter settlement. But where there seemed to be no room for hope, a miracle—brought about by hard work, grassroots organizing, and tremendous energy—happened. In 1987, a group of peasants assembled and fought for their right to health care, a right assured by Haiti’s constitution.