It’s hard to like “Supermoms”, don’t you think? They multi-task well, have lovely families, and their houses aren’t strewn with toys, shoes, dog hair, and stacks of papers and books like mine. So when I met Lesley King, the classically tall, blonde Old Greenwich resident, who quickly offered me some totally delicious Rwandan tea (would someone please import that!), in a lovely, not ostentatious waterfront house with gentle rhythms of African music playing softly in the background, I couldn’t help but like her.
Lesley used to be on Wall Street. At JP Morgan, she ran several different fixed income groups and survived the merger with Chase Bank. I imagine that she did extremely well in that male-dominated arena: She has the intellect, drive and directness well-suited to those high pressure jobs. But at some point, she discovered that she had another calling.
So, Lesley left the banking world and unlike many of us who would have taken some time off to relax after leaving a job, she quickly jumped into the local scene: she became the Old Greenwich PTA President for the 2006/2007 school year, became an interim Executive Director for Trinity Church when it’s senior pastor, Ian Cron, left, and she gave birth to her fourth child. Did I mention that she multi-tasks really well?
At some point she also read the book, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. This book tells the stunning and truly inspiring story of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Boston based doctor who started the non-profit Partners In Health to try to avert preventable deaths caused by infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis in the developing world. Until recently, it was believed that those diseases were “untreatable” in poor settings: The drugs were too expensive and there was no way to ensure that patients would reliably take their medicine. Dr. Farmer and PIH have proved otherwise working in nine countries around the world: Haiti, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi, Mexico, Guatemala and the United States.
Motivated by the story of Paul Farmer, Lesley offered to host an informational event for PIH at her house. She sent out a large group email invitation but figured she’d end up hosting a small event. The response to her email was tremendous: she had to host two events, one in the day and one at night, to accommodate everyone. Thus began her journey with Partners In Health.
Lesley joined the Board of Directors for Partners In Health in June 2009. Since then, she has prioritized this cause and has included her family in the experience. She travels several times a month up to Boston for PIH board meetings. She once hosted a Rwandan boy’s choir at her home for two weeks. Last fall she went to Rwanda with two of her children, Grace (11 years old) and Liam (9 years old) and Kim Marie Evans and her 9 year old son, JJ. They went to visit Betsy Dickey, also from Old Greenwich, who was working on plans to develop a Library and Learning Center for the PIH hospital in Rwanda . I asked her how the trip to Rwanda had affected Grace and Liam thinking that they might have been shocked by the poverty and Lesley said, “The kids felt totally at ease in Rwanda because they were with friends from the boy’s choir that had stayed at our house”. Kids are amazing: they don’t judge poverty and they have an innate sense of the common bonds between all humans. I often think they have much less to learn than we do.
Lesley was just about to visit Haiti when the earthquake struck. Fortunately, PIH’s hospitals are intact, very few local PIH people lost their lives, and thanks to their health care model of using community health care workers, they are still able to provide health care.
The work that has to be done post quake is daunting. According the Lesley, PIH has two priorities in Haiti: build a teaching hospital and help the Ministry of Health, PIH’s government partner, get back on its feet. Building a teaching hospital is hugely important not only to increase the number of highly trained local doctors but also to increase the number of surgery rooms. After the earthquake, the government of Haiti estimates that over 4,000 amputations were performed. Many, according to Medscape Medical News, were done by foreign doctors with no anesthesia in make-shift tents. Before the earthquake, any surgery, even a life-saving one, was a rarity in Haiti. As Lesley grimly describes, “In Haiti, any surgery is considered a luxury”. This is a level of need that is very hard to comprehend.
There are those who criticize individuals who give of their time, talent and money to help people in far-away places. Lesley’s thoughtful response to this general critique was, “First you have to go where your passion is. And second, as Oprah Winfrey said, you have to do both- local and international- and you have to go where the need is greatest”. I admire Lesley for taking the path less traveled, for putting off tennis games and lunches and focusing her many talents on areas of real need. The world is certainly a better place thanks to Lesley King and Partners In Health.
If you would like to learn more about PIH, please go to their website www.pih.org
And definitely read Tracy Kidder’s book, Mountains Beyond Mountains.
