I HAD extraordinary parents, Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal, who were both adventurous, and that filtered down to me. My father went off exploring as a teenager, and my mother left her Southern town to pursue acting. I decided to leave my idyllic childhood in the English countryside to go to Haiti at age 18. Before that, I had always thought I wanted to act. I loved to observe adults and take on different accents and do imitations. I wanted to go to London and go on stage. I took it quite seriously until I went to Haiti, which changed everything.

I went off to volunteer in an orphanage in Haiti in 1983 and saw poverty in the developing world for the first time. It was an eye-opening experience. I remember early on, when we were doing a population-based health surveillance project. We would walk for hours into the countryside and come upon a hut. The children would be milling about, and they'd run and get their parents in the field. The parents would invite me inside and offer me the only chair. To sit in a house which is 12 feet by 6 feet, with a dirt floor and one bed with six children, makes you realize that this is how people are living on our planet today, just a 90-minute flight from Miami.

Image Credit... Partners in Health

It was so overwhelming that I thought about leaving, but it would have been torturous to have gone to see it and then turn my back on it. So it was an enormous relief when I met Paul Farmer there.