Good News on Foot

In 1987, a twenty-seven-year-old Harvard medical student named Paul Farmer made a choice that baffled his peers. Rather than chase a lucrative career in Boston, he co-founded Partners in Health — known locally as Zanmi Lasante — in Cange, a community in Haiti's Central Plateau whose residents had been displaced decades earlier by the Péligre Dam. The region had no paved roads, no reliable electricity, and almost no access to modern medicine.…