The Rugged Altruists nytimes.com + "A Public Health Physician's Journey..."
Excerpt
Rye Barcott was a student at the University of North Carolina who spent a summer sharing a 10-by-10 shack in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya. One night he awoke with diarrhea and stumbled to the public outhouse. He slid onto the cement floor and vomited as his bare body hit puddles of human waste.
He left his soiled pants outside the hut, but when he went to find them later they were gone. He was directed to another hut where a stick-thin girl, with missing clumps of hair, had the pants, scrubbed and folded, in her lap. Barcott said softly, “I’m grateful,” and asked her why she had cleaned them. “Because I can,” she replied. A week later, she died of AIDS and her body was taken in a wheelbarrow to a communal grave.
Over the next several years, Barcott served as an officer in the Marines in places like Iraq and created an inspiring organization called Carolina for Kibera, which offers health services and serves as a sort of boys and girls club for children in the slum.
Excerpted
Who's Talking? with D.G. Martin, chapelboro.com
Apr 22, 2011
Dr. Richard A. Vinroot Jr., the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health’s 43rd Annual Fred T. Foard Memorial Lecturer, on the topic "A Public Health Physician's Journey Through Flood, Earthquake and the Wake of War."
