2011 Week One

Dr. Jean Chamberlain Froese’s kids are global children. They each know what it feels like to go to an international school, be the only kid in class who speaks English and spend only four months of the year in their hometown of Ontario, Canada. This is because for the other eight months of the year, their mom teaches Ugandan leaders about maternal mortality and trains them to change the way their neighborhoods treat maternal and child health.

Since the mid-1980s, Sandra Thurman has been fighting for AIDS education and prevention throughout the world. As director of Emory University’s Interfaith Health Program, she leads health practitioners into different faith regions to bring about community health improvements.

The screen behind Dr. Paul Farmer depicted a Rwandan man with a short gray beard on his chin, his lips curved into a vague smile. He wore blue cloth pants held up with a loose belt that dangled from his fragile hips. He had no shirt, drawing immediate attention to his frail body. His ribs protruded from underneath his skin, his arms nothing but bone covered with a thin layer of skin. In his right hand, he gripped a wooden walking stick. “I said upon meeting this man, whose name is John, ‘We have all the medications that we need to get you better,’” Farmer said.

The Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra and The Pied Pipers will bring back the “good ol’ days” at 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater. The group will play ’40s music with a universal appeal — think Frank Sinatra with a Michael Buble twist.

Despite their differences, religion and maternal mortality go hand in hand. “We can’t address health issues without dealing with faith communities, and in many of these communities, the most important leaders are faith leaders,” said Ambassador Mark Dybul, the co-director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health law at Georgetown University and the Interfaith Lecture Series’ first guest lecturer.

A man who has tirelessly sought to tackle a global health care crisis by helping one person at a time will speak at Chautauqua today. Paul Farmer is one of the founders of Partners In Health, an international organization that provides medical care and advocates for social justice for underprivileged patients across the world. He will speak at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater.