Over 200 high school students spent an inspiring, enjoyable Saturday in December at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Marcy at what was our largest Model UN conference yet.

Some students represented non-governmental organizations and told standing-room-only committees what they do.

“Partners in Health” began when Dr. Paul Farmer visited the remote village Cange in Haiti where health care was unknown. Farmer describes what he found in his book, “Mountains beyond Mountains,” and how he changed everything in that poorest pocket of Haiti.

Daily hot lunches served to 9,000 students at 41 schools in the Central Plateau help them prosper. He returns regularly and replicates his work in Africa and Central and South America. He is special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on community-based medicine and lessons from Haiti. He chairs Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, and heads the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Recent books are “In the Company of the Poor” and “To Repair the World.”

Partners in Health co-founder Jim Yong Kim is now president of the World Bank Group, with two great goals: Reduce extreme poverty to 3 percent or less by 2030, and promote greater equity in the developing world. Kim directed the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS Department.

Haitians never knew cholera before 2010. Contaminated sewage leaked into a tributary of the 200-mile Artibonite River following the devastating earthquake in Haiti, causing a cholera epidemic second only to one now ravaging Yemen. Cholera kills within 24 hours from dehydration; Partners in Health treated 180,000 people and trained 3,300 community health workers in health centers they’ve established in Haiti.

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