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Noted humanitarian Dr. Paul Farmer, a founder of the charitable organization “Partners in Health”, talked about the health-care needs of the poor in Haiti at Christ Church Episcopal on Sunday.

More than 20 years ago Dr. Farmer and a few other great minds created a charity called “Partners in Health” to revolutionize the delivery of health care worldwide thus saving millions of lives in places where no one thought there was any reason for hope.

According to Dr. Farmer:

The idea that because you’re born in Haiti you could die having a child. The idea that because you’re born in you know Malawi your children may go to bed hungry. We want to take some of the chance out of that.

Asked how many lives he thinks Partners In Health has saved, Farmer says:

In medicine, we say ‘TNTC,’ too numerous to count.

What began as a small, understaffed and ill-equipped clinic in 1985, today has 100 inpatient beds, an array of specialists, and three operating rooms. They have nearly two million patient visits a year. And the medical care at the clinic is free. For Farmer, health care is a human right. He wants to show the world that children for example don’t have to die of treatable illnesses like tuberculosis or malaria, diseases which they treat every day.

Haitians are so desperate for medical care that each night people sleep on the ground, outside the hospital, just waiting to get treated.

Asked what that tells him about his work, Farmer replied:

It tells me that if you set your sights high and if you stick with it, you can make real progress. That’s what it says to me.

Farmer spends most of his time commuting between the hospitals in Rwanda and Haiti. One of his priorities is to train a new generation of doctors to follow in his footsteps, physicians like David Walton.

Partners In Health has expanded and now works in nine countries, including Peru, Russia, Mexico and three countries in Africa. With 6,000 employees worldwide, their budget of $50 million dollars is barely enough to keep it going.