But on that day, movie scenes were the furthest things from the minds of doctor, patient, and everyone in the exam room. The interaction between Kim and Huauya would become one of the most moving story lines in Bending the Arc, a 2017 documentary that tracks the 30-year evolution of PIH. The image was shocking: Huauya was nothing but skin and bones. He spoke in a soothing tone and lifted his patient’s shirt to better listen to his heart and lungs. While the frail young man slumped in a chair, his posture the picture of dejection, Kim began his exam. Jim Yong Kim, a co-founder of Partners In Health (PIH) and Harvard-trained epidemiologist, sat in the exam room and greeted Huauya in Spanish. The young patient felt honored to receive the special attention, and descended once again, this time to Sergio E. Huauya was told there was a foreigner who wanted to see him. Then, one day, something truly unexpected happened. Yet, if he was to beat the disease and not infect his family, he had to make the pilgrimage. All he wanted was to stay at home, curled into a ball in his bed, resting. After Huauya painfully swallowed a handful of pills, his generous volunteers would lay him gently back in the makeshift stretcher and hike back up the stairs to home.įor Huauya, the daily journey was exhausting. They did this every day, for several weeks, so that the then 20-year-old could take his medication against multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, one of the deadliest forms of the disease.
I t took four strong, kind-hearted volunteers nearly two hours to carry Melquiades Huauya Ore, lying waiflike in a bedsheet, from his home in El Agustino neighborhood in the hills of Lima, Peru, down a series of steep stairs to the closest health center.