Panjabi Fills the Minds of Hungry Students
by Dev Varma on March 6, 2010
Ubuntu, invoked most famously by Desmond Tutu, means in its most basic English translation “I am because you are.” For Panjabi, this is not only a novel idea; it is a method, a humanistic (and thus powerful) tool for achieving global health equity. Panjabi’s own experiences in Liberia have informed his argument. He kicked off the brunt of his lecture with the start of his own story. In 1990, he witnessed firsthand the evacuation of Liberia at the start of its brutal civil war. While waiting on the tarmac for his escape from the bloodshed, Panjabi saw a mass of women, all with bloodied lapas (the cloth tied around women’s backs to hold their children), being restrained by government police from escaping the bloodshed. He was able to escape safely. But as his plane took off, he could not get the faces of those women and their bloody lapas out of his mind. In this singular moment he saw some of the most inhuman injustices of our time, and he committed himself to alleviating them.
In his attempt to battle these injustices, Panjabi helped establish the HIV Equity Initiative (modeled after Partners in Health’s model of the same name) which he emphasized spat in the face of those who claim that rural health initiatives cannot treat HIV effectively. He told the story of Mary, a former refugee turned peasant farmer, who went through the HIV Equity Initiative treatment. Within months of treatment, Mary gained her strength and actually joined the staff at the same initiative that treats her.
For Panjabi, this proved a profound point, namely that being skeptical of immodest claims to feasibility helps human beings live the healthy lives they deserve. Along with this point, Panjabi harps on the need to be reflective on both our own actions and the local and global histories which affect the issues we are trying to solve.
To close his speech, Panjabi calls his starving student audience to master the languages of power and of love in order to make any effective effort for social change. This point, which hits home for quite a few of the GlobeMed, clan is quickly becoming a modus operandi for students committed to fighting for global health equity.
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