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Foreword ix Foreword Walking Together, Walking Far is surely the best title that could be devised for a book about people from two very different nations, coming together to fight AIDS. Fran Quigley has done a superb job in describing what is, on the face of it, a straightforward collaboration between an American academic medical center and another one in Africa. Hundreds of similar collaborations link academic institutions on the two continents, in addition to thousands , if not tens of thousands, of bicontinental AIDS programs of other kinds. With so much experience on tap, it is unfortunate that so many lessons remain to be learned about the process of “accompaniment,” as walking together is termed in theological circles. For if projects that link the rich world—any American university would qualify as such—to the poorer reaches of the developing world are to succeed, then learning to walk together must become a key goal of such connections. But this book is about much more than teamwork in the face of a devastating illness that happens to be the leading killer of young adults in Western Kenya. More importantly, it’s about the epiphanies experienced by some of the heroes in the book, and about how they acted, and continue to act, on these epiphanies. It’s about how these protagonists decided to walk together with Kenyan colleagues, students, patients, and sundry family members. This, then, is a book about awakenings and transformations as much as it is about a partnership between a U.S. and an African medical school, with implications for just about anyone seeking to understand the ways in which global structural inequalities , the chief reason that AIDS is prevalent in some areas and rare in others, undermine good-will efforts to take on disease and poverty. There is no shortage of these efforts, but rather a growing enthusiasm for them, especially among students. One recent piece in the Washington Post observes that “For a Global Generation , Public Health Is a Hot Field,” and this is a book that should be read by every student of public health. x Foreword x Foreword It would be easy to make these claims in a sweeping fashion, but I’d like to explore them in the down-to-earth style in which this book is written. “Accompaniment” is precisely the notion that has driven forward our own work in Haiti, Peru, Rwanda, Malawi, Lesotho, Burundi, Boston, and elsewhere. “Walking together ” is as good a term as any—as long as all parties concerned can walk. Not everyone in this book can walk; not everyone walks out alive. But the reason this book is such an important contribution is that it is about a group of people who questioned received wisdom about what is possible in treating the destitute sick. It’s also a book about the power, and limitations, of empathy. Imagine that you are a doctor or a nurse. Imagine that you are from Indiana, but understand that the place you call home is only one of many salient facts about you. Others include the ability to see humanity in every face, and especially in the face of those sick with treatable afflictions but too poor to obtain them. In many ways, this book tells the story of Dr. Joe Mamlin, a professor of medicine at Indiana University. Mamlin was, we read, “seeking to put the finishing touches” on his career, a successful one by any standard. He’d had previous experience in Kenya, and was planning to spend a couple of years as a clinician-teacher at the Moi University School of Medicine, which had long had a formal relationship with his home university in the United States. But his work in Western Kenya, one of the epicenters of the AIDS pandemic, made it increasingly difficult for him to say goodbye to medicine or to Kenya. The wards of the nascent teaching hospital were full of dying young people, including a student named Daniel Ochieng. At the outset, in the fall of 2000, Ochieng was one of millions of nameless and faceless people suffering in obscurity, dying from AIDS. How, then, do we even know his name and see his photograph in this wonderful book? As a physician working in the poorest reaches of the world, I can recognize the scene Quigley so vividly describes: one of Mamlin’s fifth-year students, Bernard Olayo, was in the hospital ward later in the day than usual (the exact time is...

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