‘We each have a battle and mine is staying here’: Haiti doctor is finalist for peace award

In Haiti, where the battle against the virus that causes AIDS has been hard fought, Dr. Marie-Marcelle H. Deschamps knows that women are key: give a woman a job, she once said, and watch her not only take charge of her life but also cut HIV transmission.

That philosophy, which Deschamps shared with first lady Laura Bush in 2008 as she visited patients and workers at the Haitian Study Group on Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections, which is known by its French acronym GHESKIO, is once again informing the treatment of the disease.