Dear editor, A globe staff Bella (English) has written that a visionary doctor is moving the mountains down there in Rwinkwavu Eatern Province. Doctor Paul Farmer managed to bring his world-renowned Partners in Health model to this central African country Rwanda which still reeling from the aftershocks of the genocide over a decade. Dr. Farmer is working with Rwandan health officials, to scout out a location for a hospital to serve the poorest of the poor. Farmer, who teaches at Harvard, was taken to Ruhengeri, Northern Province. They took him in a descent hospital with employees and even an X-ray machine but he refused them all, saying that he wanted the worst possible place in the country. So they took him to Rwinkwavu, a remote area east of Kigali. The hospital consisted of derelict buildings that had been used by a Belgian mining company decades earlier, then as military barracks during the genocide. In the summer of 2005, the doors opened at Rwinkwavu Hospital, which now sees 250 patients a day, some of them walking hours to get there. Farmer, Rich, and their Rwandan counterparts have built a second hospital in an equally remote area of 200,000 - also without a single doctor - and built or renovated 19 health centers that feed patients to them. A third hospital is on the drawing board, designed by Harvard architecture students. Ultimately, they plan to expand rural medical services to the entire country. Five years ago; Farmer became reluctantly famous with the publication of Tracy Kidder’s best-selling book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, which told the story of the brash Harvard Medical School graduate who changed the face of healthcare in rural Haiti. Now 20 years old, Partners in Health, with its emphasis on treating poverty as well as disease has expanded to nine countries. Kigali
