Midwives reaching women and babies still experiencing the impacts of last year’s Maui wildfires. Doctors in Haiti keeping the doors open for patients, even at immense personal risk. A trafficking survivor using lived experience to help others.
Direct Relief relies on their expertise to know what is needed, and their resilience represents the best of humanity even in the darkest of times.
This year, Direct Relief has shipped more than $1.6 billion in medical aid to 90 countries. But behind those abstract numbers are real people, working to serve others in tremendously challenging situations, whether during an emergency or while experiencing limited resources — or both.
Here are some of their stories.
Kranti Tamang on the Anti-Trafficking, Anti-Stigma Revolution
Trafficking survivor Shanti Tamang, and her daughter, Kranti, are providing safe spaces for survivors to thrive and dismantle the stigma that comes with living with HIV in Nepal.
Shanti had been taken from her job in Nepal and forced into sex trafficking in India as a teenager. After escaping and returning home, Shanti’s family and community rejected her upon learning she was living with HIV, and she was forced to find work and housing on her own. For a time, she was so unwell that she had to leave her daughter, Kranti, at an orphanage.
Then, in 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Nepal, and a border blockade between Nepal and India, cut off the supply of critical medications into Nepal, including the HIV treatment on which Shanti’s life depended.
With the help of a friend, Shanti connected with Direct Relief, which provided a supply of antiretroviral drugs for a number of Nepali people living with HIV, including Shanti.
“We love to say that Direct Relief saved my mother’s life,” Kranti shared with Direct Relief’s Brianna Newport. “And when she felt that she had been given a second chance to her life, she had to do more for her community.”
Shanti went on to found the Shanti Foundation, which works to rescue, rehabilitate, and reintegrate trafficking survivors and people living with HIV.
Plan A Health Hits the Road for Patients in Mississippi Delta
A local team travels across the Mississippi Delta to ensure every adult has access to quality reproductive care, contraceptives, and trusting relationships with their medical team.
Plan A provides reproductive and primary care health throughout the Mississippi Delta, a region that historically has had poor health outcomes and low economic status. Their small team operates a mobile medical unit, outfitted with two exam rooms, that truck driver Antoinette Roby drives from city to city.
Since its inception in 2018, Plan A has expanded to include a pharmacy, mail-order prescriptions, options for contraceptives, pre-and-post-natal care for patients with HIV, and telehealth for family planning. They’ve also hired a nurse practitioner that patients can call or text directly to ask questions.
The team includes Desiree Norwood, who is the mayor of her hometown of Sunflower, Mississippi. Norwood said when the mobile medical unit arrives in Sunflower, people are excited because Plan A has built a reputable reputation.
“A lot of organizations come into the community, and they do evaluations and research and then what happens? They leave,” she told Direct Relief journalist Olivia Lewis. “We’ve actually been able to fill a lot of gaps and alleviate some of those barriers that they’re facing.”
“This isn’t working a job, it’s a passion,” Norwood said.
In Panama, Type 1 Diabetes Care Improves by Empowering Young People
Pilar Gomez, DiabetesLATAM’s founder and director, started DiabetesLATAM after moving to Panama in 2017 with a son and daughter diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. With little in the way of services for people living with diabetes in Panama, Gomez decided to change that, reported Brianna Newport.
Kids like her own needed reliable access to insulin. Through contacts at the International Diabetes Federation, she got in touch with the Life for a Child team, an Australia-based NGO that, in partnership with Direct Relief, provides insulin to young people in 45 under-resourced countries.
When plans to provide insulin and education through a local hospital fell through, Gomez created a completely volunteer-run program separate from the hospitals for families that don’t have guaranteed insulin access. The program began in August 2022 with 30 kids enrolled, and in the last two years, it has grown to support 150 kids with diabetes care. That means that DiabetesLATAM now provides care for roughly 1 out of every 10 people living with Type 1 in Panama, according to the prevalence numbers from the Type 1 Index.
“Living Day by Day,” Health Staff in Haiti Keep Hospital Doors Open as Violence Continues
Since 2010, Haiti has faced a catastrophic earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people, Hurricane Matthew, cholera outbreaks, the assassination of former President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, and a 7.2-magnitude earthquake the following month. Gang violence continued to rock the country this year, and health providers went to heroic lengths to show up to work, putting themselves at risk, reported Direct Relief journalist Noah Smith.
“We’ve never seen a situation like this,” said Dr. Marc Edson Augustin, medical director of the St. Luke’s Foundation, which runs a hospital in Port-au-Prince and clinics nationwide that care for about 60,000 patients annually.
Direct Relief provided $1 million in financial support to health organizations across the country so they could maintain operating budgets and continue serving patients.
Health Care Hero: A Landfill Fire Was Poisoning Her Patients. She Cared for Them at Home.
Alejandra Hernandez Ezquivel was in her house in the 500-person community of Santa María Chimalhuacán, in eastern Mexico, when her husband came running indoors. The landfill nearby — the one that had appeared one day out of nowhere years earlier, with no opportunity for the community to object — was on fire.
“It was like a monster, so immense,” she told Talya Meyers, Direct Relief senior editor and writer, through a translator, recalling the fire that began raging on May 29, 2022. The blaze was out of control by the time firemen arrived at the rural community, located in the municipality of Chimalhuacán, about an hour away from Mexico City.
Ezquivel cared for patients all the while, eventually working to help establish a full-time primary care center, funded by the NGO Fundación Escala, which Direct Relief has supported with medications. With the nearest health facility two hours away, the primary care center fills a huge gap in care.
“Whatever patients need, that’s what we provide,” Ezquivel explained.
After a Disaster, “the Mothers Will Call You to Where You Need to Be”
Picture a disaster’s first responders. A firefighter dousing a blaze or a doctor treating a critical injury might come to mind. But midwives caring for pregnant women and newborns are also critical responders during disasters, a fact that Sunny Chen, executive director of Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition of Hawai’i, knows firsthand.
“When the disaster happened, our Maui partners called us and said, ‘we need you to come,’ and so we brought the mobile clinic here and we were able to provide critical medical care and services,” she said. “That’s the amazing thing about midwives and nurses. We just do whatever it takes, and we adapt.”
The organization’s midwives and nurses were some of the first medical responders to reach Maui after the devastating 2023 wildfires and continue to provide care for families.
“When you take care of mothers and pregnant and parenting people, you really take care of a whole community,” Chen said. “The mothers will call you to where you need to be.”
For Kids with Diabetes, This Summer Camp Is Like Any Other. But It’s Theirs.
Camp Conrad Chinnock in Southern California looks right out of a movie set: archery set, mess hall, climbing wall, flagpole, even a swimming pool. Campers laugh and lurch about, making jokes and trading stories as they walk to the next activity together, reported Direct Relief journalist Noah Smith when he visited the camp this summer.
The familiar atmosphere is precisely the aim. Camp Conrad Chinnock’s purpose is to give children with Type 1 diabetes a typical summer camp experience. Due to the nature of T1D, it’s not a simple proposition.
“The burden of diabetes management is minute-to-minute, constant, 24 hours. You can’t quit. And it’s always part of your thinking in the background. But when you come to camp, you have a support network that helps to carry your load,” said Tracy Fulkerson, a former camper who is now on the medical staff at the camp and works as a pediatric intensive care unit nurse supervisor at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego.
Having trained support staff and medications and supplies needed to manage diabetes allows campers to focus on fun. Direct Relief’s insulin donations, which are used every day during the camp season, keep prices affordable. Without them, the cost of attendance would multiply several times over, said Rocky Wilson, camp director.
“Camp could not exist without donated insulin.”
Fire Destroyed an Island Hospital. Months Later, a Honduran Free Clinic Is Still Bridging the Gap.
When a fire had destroyed the only public hospital on the island of Roatán, Honduras, staff at Clinica Esperanza, a local free clinic, were part of an immediate, community-wide response.
Thousands relied on the hospital for care, reported Direct Relief journalist Olivia Lewis. Patients and hospital staff were being routed to local medical practices to receive emergency care, and Clinic Esperanza staff said they couldn’t imagine having to turn anyone away.
“I cannot handle the idea that people can die because they don’t have any other option,” said Kallie Vallecillo, CEO of Clinica Esperanza, which has operated in the community for 22 years.
Clinica Esperanza, which relies on medical students and volunteers to operate, extended its daily hours to meet the increased need.
