DIvIDEnD - Stephen M. Ross School of Business - University of ...

FirstPerson
like many people worldwide, i watched the
coverage of January’s earthquake in haiti
from the safety of my living room. i felt a
heartbreaking million miles away from the country
i left just three years earlier to pursue my mBa at
Ross. Day after day, cnn delivered vivid images
of Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta, BS ’90/
MD ’93, against a backdrop of makeshift tents and
rubble. i connected with their obvious frustration
that assistance and supplies were slow to arrive,
causing “senseless and preventable” suffering.
i knew all too well from my time in haiti that the
dilemma of not having what you need — when you
need it — is nothing new for this island nation.
Prior to Ross, i worked with Partners
in health in Boston and in rural haiti, a
bumpy two-hour drive north of Port-au-
Prince on largely unpaved roads. my role
was to help manage maternal and child
healthcare programs across a network
of nine full-service, chiefly haitianrun
hospitals delivering free care to
a poverty-stricken population. in my
everyday work — be it devising a grant’s
implementation plan, establishing a new
protocol to collect data, or producing a
quarterly financial report — i quickly
learned that my managerial success was
rooted in my ability to engage, listen
to, and support the expert vision of the
haitian staff — community health
workers and doctors alike.
watching the earthquake coverage,
i was reminded of a day trip in 2006. i
accompanied a team of haitian medical
staff on one of the multiple mobile clinics
held each week for remote mountaintop
communities surrounding the main
hospitals. truck, then foot, then donkeys
took us to meet the patients who had
been waiting since sunrise. one elderly
peasant farmer mumbled between gaps
where teeth used to be, his hands shaking
64 DIvIDEnD spring 2010
Lighting the
Way in Haiti
Dara Moses, MBA ’09, Partners in Health (2004-07)
as he explained to the haitian nurse,
“M gen yon dlo si k’ap lave mwen.” (the
sour water washes over me.) later i
learned that, like so many others we saw
that day, he complained of heartburn —
not from indigestion but from an empty
stomach. we had climbed this mountain
to provide healthcare, only to come face
to face with endemic hunger. armed only
with drugs, the nurse had no choice but
to medicate his hunger with antacids
and vitamins.
far more people than expected arrived
at the clinic, and the nurse insisted we
stay until everyone was seen. already
dusk, we packed the remaining supplies
onto the donkeys and descended
the increasingly dark footpath. without
an electric grid or a full moon, the countryside
soon became so dark that even
the donkeys had trouble maintaining
their footing. the nurse started calling
out for help. within moments, a local
woman shouted back to us that she had a
flashlight, but no batteries. a man’s voice
then emerged from a different direction,
offering us the batteries straight out of
his handheld radio. out of the darkness,
local residents pieced together a working
Dara Moses, MBA ’09,
with colleagues from the
partners in Health pharmacy
team in Haiti, 2006.
flashlight that led us the rest of the way.
the global outpouring of support for
haiti has been incredible. the Ross community
has mobilized to take the best
possible action in this terrible situation,
raising money to support Partners in
health and other locally embedded organizations
working to “build back better.”
i know firsthand how frustrating it
can be to address one issue in haiti, only
to discover another — be it a chronic
lack of food or the crippling logistical
difficulties of distributing supplies to the
people who need it most. as i think back
on those peasant farmers who helped a
trained medical team procure a critical
flashlight, i am reminded of the valuable
human resources that exist on the
ground in haiti. my personal hope is that
the global community will work directly
with the haitian people to help them
devise long-term solutions to their longstanding
challenges, and that we will not
confuse a need for resources with a lack
of locally developed ideas and solutions
for the future.
Dara Moses is an associate in the higher education
practice at Huron Consulting group in Ann Arbor.