Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [18]
Bob Harrison doesn’t make quite as much money working to save our kids as he did at Goldman Sachs, but the good he does is a rich reward.
THERE ARE MORE and more people becoming time-givers after successful careers. Dr. Consuelo Beck-Sagué came to the United States from Cuba in 1961. For twenty years she worked at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, specializing in HIV, TB, hospital infections, reproductive health, and child abuse. After attending the international AIDS conference in Barcelona in 2002, she and her husband decided that when they retired, they would devote themselves to caring for people infected with the virus. The next year, they moved to the Dominican Republic, and Dr. Beck-Sagué began providing antiretroviral therapy to children and adults at her clinic in La Romana and others throughout the country. She has now seen to it that hundreds of people are, in her words, “snatched from an untimely death, and brought back to the arms of their loved ones.” The doctor sent me pictures of Juan, one of her patients, the first taken in May 2005 when he started ARVs and nutritional support, weighing seventy-five pounds. In the second, taken just four months later, Juan weighs a healthy 130 pounds. He now has a full-time job and works as a volunteer caregiver.
In late 2004, Jimmy and Janet Jones came to my office in Harlem to talk about our AIDS work. They had both had interesting careers and had long been active in church and community-service activities, including a program they ran providing twenty-five to thirty college scholarships a year for minority students in New Jersey. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, Jimmy played professional football for four years, then had a successful business career with a number of companies before retiring as senior vice president and chief of human resources at Reebok International. Janet earned a doctorate in education, which led her into a thirty-five-year career as a teacher, school district administrator, and human resources consultant.
Shortly after their visit to Harlem, Jimmy and Janet agreed to become the project leaders of our HIV effort in Lesotho. A small mountain kingdom of 1.8 million people completely surrounded by South Africa, Lesotho has one of the world’s highest HIV rates: about a quarter of the population is infected. Over the course of a year, the Joneses made ten two-week visits to Lesotho, and assembled a team of clinical and business experts to develop a plan for care and treatment across the country. They faced many problems, including a shortage of health-care workers, an aversion to condom use, and an infected population with severe malnourishment and a great deal of tuberculosis.
The team led by the Joneses delivered their five-year plan in May 2005. It is now being implemented, and the Lesotho government has begun an effort to test every person over twelve for HIV/AIDS. But developing a plan wasn’t enough for the Joneses. They also continued their education mission, making sure children learned how to prevent the spread of HIV and even persuading my foundation to donate $35,000 to cover the fees of hundreds of high school seniors who otherwise would have been forced to drop out.
Our AIDS project in Lesotho has been given the gift of time by others as well, local citizens who are neither wealthy nor financially secure. Their great resource is that they are HIV-positive. These “expert patients” visit all the villages, often areas so remote they’re reachable only on foot or on the back of a four-legged carrier. They try to combat the stigma and fear of AIDS and to convince people to be tested so that they can get proper care and treatment and don’t infect others.
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