Sarah Shannon is Executive Director of Hesperian Health Guides, best known for their book Where There Is No Doctor, which has been translated into over 85 languages, reaching over 100 million people globally. The World Health Organization calls it "the most widely used health manual in the world."  

From 1982-1991, Sarah trained hundreds of Salvadoran community health promoters in Honduran refugee camps and helped organize water and sanitation projects throughout isolated regions of western Honduras. In 1991, Sarah repatriated to El Salvador with the refugees and provided finance, administrative and logistical support to their resettlement, and then developed innovative training in accounting and financial literacy for their community-based initiatives. These experiences strengthened Sarah's appreciation of lay abilities and expertise, and her understanding of their centrality to the success of community health and development.

Hesperian Health Guides is a nonprofit health information and health education source that supports individuals and communities in their struggles to realize the right to health. They develop easy to read materials that are produced in many languages. All are available through their bookstore and the new Hesperian Digital Commons.

We discuss the work of Hesparian, the health care crisis throughout the world, including the US, and how great disparities in wealth and lack of affordable health care exacerbated the COVID pandemic resulting in millions of needless deaths. We also discuss the work of the People's Health Movement on whose Global Steering Council Sarah Shannon was the North American representative.

You can hear my interview with Sarah Shannon, on Tuesday, April 11, 2023 at 9:00 AM on WGDR 91.1 FM; WGDH 91.7 FM; online at www.wgdr.org (click on "Listen Live") or on Facebook. With on-demand streaming for two weeks after air date at www.wgdr.org/on-demand"