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Thursday March 28, 2019 vol. cxliii no. 32
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Q&A
ON CAMPUS
Q&A with Dr. Raj Panjabi, CEO of Last Mile Health
William J. Burns critiques Trump administration’s foreign policy
By Vedika Patwari Contributor
One of TIME’s 100 Most Inf luential People in the World in 2016 and the recipient of the 2017 TED Prize of $1 million, Dr. Raj Panjabi is a LiberianIndian American physician, Instructor in Medicine and the Department of Global Health at Harvard Medical School, and a co-founder of Last Mile Health, an organization dedicated to bringing healthcare to rural communities in Liberia and around the world. On Wednesday, The Daily Princetonian sat down with Panjabi to learn more about his work and his efforts to help build primary healthcare systems around the world. Panjabi urged interested students and healthcare professionals to join him and leaders around the world in this work through the Community Health Academy platform, which aims to open source community health best practices from around the world. The Daily Princetonian (DP): Could you walk us through your whirlwind journey? Raj Panjabi (RP): I grew up in West Africa since my parents migrated there from India in the 1970s. When I was nine, civil war broke out in Liberia. That set my family, and hundreds of thousands of others, f leeing. We moved to Sierra Leone and ultimately settled in North Carolina. We were fortunate as immigrants to be taken in by other families who helped us restart our life. The community that rallied around us had a big role to play in ensuring that dreams, that would have otherwise been destroyed by the disruption caused by f leeing war, didn’t get destroyed. Because of my parents’ persistence and because of that community, I had the chance to go to medical school. When I was 24, I wanted to go back to Liberia to see if I could serve the people we had left behind. When I got home in 2005, what I found was just utter destruction. The physical infrastructure that you might imagine could be destroyed in a 15-year civil war was, indeed, destroyed. My school had been damaged; there was no running water in the capital. What was equally, if not more, painful was the human infrastructure we lost. So many
people had f led the country and many had not returned. We had lost a generation of professionals. We were left with 51 doctors serving a population of four and a half million people. Putting that in perspective, it would be like having eight doctors to serve the city of Washington, D.C. If you got sick in rural communities, where I was serving as a clinician in government clinics, you could die from conditions that no one should die from in the 21st century. We’ve lived for many decades with innovations in medicine. These innovations were simply not reaching last mile communities that were thought too hard to reach or too expensive to serve. My father used to say that no condition is permanent, and it is a saying that comes from West Africa. My wife and I launched Last Mile Health with fellow health workers from Liberia and America in 2007 with $6000 from our wedding donations. We sometimes joke that it was either the most romantic or the least romantic thing we’ve ever done. Over the years, we’ve supported the Government of Liberia and a coalition of actors to launch a National Community Health Assistant Program, which seeks to employ 400 nurses and other frontline clinicians in rural community clinics and 4000 community health workers in remote communities. Increasingly, we’re doing similar work in support of other countries. DP: You were based in America before you decided to go back to Liberia and start Last Mile Health. What were your greatest initial challenges? RP: There were some practical barriers and some personal ones. The practical ones are how do you pick the right team, how do you define the right mission, how do you ensure that the problems you’re working on are truly the problems that the community is facing. Are we serving the real needs of people that have been marginalized? It takes a while to figure that out. We spent a lot of time listening to patients and visiting their homes. For four years, we tried a number of different projects. Then, See PANJABI page 3
Associate News Editor
According to former Ambassador William J. Burns, in an increasingly competitive and globalized world, diplomacy has never mattered more than it does today. “We’re not the only geopolitically big kid on the block,” Burns said. “The United States has a better hand to play than any of our rivals if we play it wisely. The keys to that are not only our economic and military leverage ... our capacity to draw alliances and mobilize coalitions of countries is what sets us apart.” On Wednesday, March 27, Burns delivered a harsh critique of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. He was interviewed by Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer, S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Middle Eastern Policy Studies and former ambassador to Israel and Egypt. The 33-year veteran of the foreign service and former Deputy Secretary of State argued that the current administration is “squandering” the leadership abilities of the United States. “There’s a dismissiveness that often comes out of the President himself toward professional diplomacy,” Burns said. He claimed that President Trump’s “diplomacy of narcissism” shows “weakness and manipulabil-
ity” to autocrats around the world. Burns highlighted Vladimir Putin’s attempt to take advantage of the weakness by interfering in the 2016 presidential election. Burns called the attempt “a combustible combination of grievance, ambition, and insecurity,” and said that Putin took it personally when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke out in favor of free speech while Russians protested Putin’s third term. “It reinforced his convictions that the United States was out to keep Russia down,” Burns said. “His view was that we had intervened in Russia’s moment of weakness [in the 1990s]. Then he saw polarization and dysfunction in our political system, and he saw a way to take advantage of it and sow chaos.” Burns expressed optimism that the Russian middle class, now stagnant in the face of Putin’s single-sector economy, might eventually seek healthier relationships with the United States. “As it’s important not to give in to Putin, it’s also important not to give up on the Russia that lies beyond Putin,” he said. In light of his new book, “The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal,” Burns discussed the various
advantages and disadvantages of dealing in secret. In the case of the Iranian nuclear deal, Burns said that excessive baggage between the two countries necessitated covert talks, and pressure mounted as he and his group of five diplomats navigated the negotiations without the help of the Department of the Treasury. “That kind of very tight circle was really essential, in this day and age, to be able to preserve the discretion of those talks,” Burns said. “While it was a controversial decision to do this secretly at that stage, I’m convinced to this day that we would not have made the progress that we did had it not been for doing it quietly.” Burns said that the deal, in particular its watchdog provisions, was the best of the available alternatives to eliminate the immediate threat of a nuclear Iran. Burns emphasized the unique diplomatic challenges between prioritizing values and interests when dealing with autocratic regimes. “It’s an important part of who we are as Americans not to check our values at the door,” he said. “We may not always be able to get our way, we may not be able to help every human rights organization that deserves our help, but I do think it’s important that we speak up on See BURNS page 2
BEYOND THE BUBBLE
Senator Ted Cruz ’92 fined $35,000 by Federal Election Commission
MICHAEL VADON / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Cruz ‘92 secured another six years in the Senate during the midterm election in Texas.
By Taylor Sharbel Contributor
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has fined Texas Senator Ted Cruz ’92 $35,000 for inaccurately reporting upwards of $1 million in loans from Goldman Sachs and Citibank during his 2012 U.S. Senate race. According to The New York Times, the Campaign Legal Center filed a report against Cruz as a response to his inaccurate reports in January 2016. The FEC then agreed that the Cruz campaign had not followed the law in a
unanimous vote. The $35,000 fine was settled upon by Cruz’s Senate campaign and the FEC, over three years after the initial claim was brought to light. The Campaign Legal Center was notified of the penalty in a letter from the FEC in March. Cruz had classified the $1 million as personal funding, The New York Times reported. He originally claimed that he used his family’s wealth, saying in a 2013 New York Times interview that he and his wife agreed to “liquidate” the family’s “entire
In Opinion
Today on Campus
Columnist Gabe Lipokowitz argues for placing classes in interdisciplinary locations, and Contributing Columnist Thomas Johnson discusses allocating course credit based on workload. PAGE 4
12:30 p.m.: After Noon Concert with Peter Carter Chapel
net worth” to fund his 2012 Senate campaign. Cruz actually received $264,000 from Citibank and $800,000 from Goldman Sachs. He failed to report these sources to the FEC. The FEC oversees all political campaign activity. Candidates receiving loans or lines of credit from commercial lenders must report all details of the loan to the FEC. The New York Times reported that Cruz has called the situation a “clerical oversight.” Cruz had reported the See CRUZ page 2
WEATHER
DR. RAJ PANJABI / LAST MILE HEALTH
Panjabi co-founded Last Mile Health, an organization that brings healthcare to rural communities in Liberia and elsewhere.
By Claire Silberman
HIGH
57˚
LOW
44˚
Mostly cloudy chance of rain:
10 percent