Caretaker Turned Changemaker: Alum’s Global Health Nonprofit Answers Calls for Healing.

Alex during a recent interview with SPH in his home. Photo credit: Nick Gooler
Caretaker Turned Changemaker: Alum’s Global Health Nonprofit Answers Calls for Healing
As the founder and executive director of Justice Health Initiative, Alex Gitungano (SPH’19) connects underserved patients in Africa and beyond to life-changing medical care.
Ten years ago, Alex Gitungano (SPH‘19) volunteered to accompany a badly burned toddler named Leo from their home country of Burundi to Boston for life-saving medical care. Alex’s leap of faith to leave everyone and everything he knew to care for a child he had just met, and his devotion to raising Leo over the tumultuous decade to follow, dramatically changed both their lives.
The Boston Globe and BU Today documented Alex and Leo’s remarkable journey, from their initial 2014 meeting through missionaries in East Africa to the day in spring 2019 when they celebrated Alex’s graduation from the School of Public Health dressed in matching robes. Since capturing hearts all over the world with their story and settling in Brookline to start their next chapter, Alex has started a nonprofit to help others like Leo.

As the founder and executive director of the Justice Health Initiative (JHI), Alex connects patients with severe and rare medical conditions to healthcare they would otherwise be unable to access or afford in their home countries. Come April, he will run the 2024 Boston Marathon, his first, to fundraise for JHI.

At age two, Leo fell into an open cooking fire and sustained grave facial injuries leading to an acute infection and permanent scarring that require ongoing surgical care. Like Leo, JHI’s patients are often children in critical need of specialized medical treatment. Their parents, desperate to alleviate their children’s suffering but faced with insurmountable systemic barriers such as extreme poverty, eventually find their way to Alex’s inbox.
For the fortunate few—JHI’s waiting list is long and the services it provides are at-times costly—JHI has been able to offer hope of healing.
Through budding partnerships with surgeons and hospitals in the US, Europe, and Africa, beginning with Leo’s plastic surgeon Dr. Richard Ehrlichman at Shriners Children’s hospital in Boston, JHI arranges low-to-no cost consultations and procedures for its patients. Additionally, inspired by Alex’s early struggles to provide for Leo’s daily needs while he underwent pro-bono surgeries in the US, JHI coordinates and covers airfare, visa fees, lodging, and other essentials for patients whose care necessitates crossing borders.
Jordana, another Burundian toddler, was one of JHI’s first patients and success stories. Born prematurely, Jordana’s first years of life were complicated by poor neurocognitive development. At the age of two, she was plagued by a jaw infection and facial palsy that caused paralysis to half of her face, emitted a strong odor, and caused pain so severe it disrupted her sleep. Her parents took her to numerous clinics in Burundi and surrounding countries, but the treatments she received, including broad-spectrum antibiotics and physical therapy, failed to help her. JHI arranged for an American surgeon in Kenya to properly diagnose and treat her infection.

Despite never meeting Alex in person, Jordana’s parents were so grateful for the role he played in her recovery that her father requested via Whatsapp that Alex send his photo so they could hang it in their home. Alex, whose Whatsapp profile features a photo of his guitar, politely declined but wept reading the message. It fed his resolve to continue fighting to help other desperate families, he says.
“I remember the first time we created a social media account [for JHI]. When I published [the] Facebook page, we had four patient requests and I was like, ‘Oh no, we’re not ready to take all of you. This was just a way of spreading the word [about] JHI,’” says Alex.
Alex discovered his love for helping patients during his undergraduate education in clinical and social psychology in Burundi. Upon arriving in the US with Leo, he pursued studies in global health and program management at SPH with the aspiration of one day making a broader impact and reaching a larger number of people than he believed he could by working with patient on an individual basis.

“I would love to see JHI growing, to expand more services and be able to help more patients,” he says.
Continuing to organize care for complex cases like Jordana’s is a tall order for an organization still in its infancy. Established in 2021, JHI’s team consists of just Alex and the six volunteers who form his board of directors. The board members say Alex’s determination in the face of an often-overwhelming volume of calls for his help has played a major role in buoying the fledgling nonprofit.

“I was always impressed with Alex’s joy for life and his depth of faith that has given him strength to persevere through challenges that few of us ever face in our lives,” says Elizabeth (Liz) Sucher, who met Alex in 2014 shortly after he and Leo arrived in Boston and now serves as JHI’s fundraising chair. “Alex is a very smart and ambitious young man and sees the possibility in himself and others. It is immensely gratifying to work with Alex and help him achieve his dream of helping vulnerable children from around the world whose families aren’t able to find care.”
Dr. Ehrlichman, who also sits on JHI’s board and has treated JHI patients, rarely runs into people with the kind of dedication and caring Alex embodies, he says. “Not only has he shepherded Leo through multiple [surgical] operations, but he has marshalled resources to get Leo a home and schooling, as well as citizenship and involvement with church. While doing everything with Leo, he managed to get a degree from BU and is now heading a nonprofit to benefit children with terrible health problems find advanced medical care. I am proud to be on his Board.”

After simultaneously leading JHI and working full-time at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health for over two years, Alex recently resigned his job to focus solely on building the nonprofit. “I felt like this is the calling of my life,” says Alex. He credits God and the community he has found through his Christian faith for giving him the strength and support to persist as circumstances out of his control—including violent unrest in Burundi that prevented him from returning with Leo as originally planned and the death of his father whose funeral he was unable to attend—have tested his resilience.
As with parenting Leo, when Alex embarked on a mission to establish his own nonprofit, he often did not know what he was doing, he says. “There’s a lot of legal process to register the organization, and you have to put in place the technical infrastructure, building the website or the donor database and the payment process—just a lot. It’s basically running a business,” he says. “But I talked to a couple of people, to friends, and everyone was like, ‘Alex, we’ve seen you doing this, and you can do it.’”
And he has. The child he taught his ABC’s is now a teenager on cusp of entering high school. Leo, now 13, has another upcoming surgery with Dr. Ehrlichman, then he is looking forward to going away to summer camp where he hopes to resume playing sports, something he has been unable to do while a bulb implanted under his scalp has been growing a delicate new skin graft to replace some of his scar tissue and accommodate his growth. Standing 5’9”, Leo likes to brag to his nurses about outgrowing 5’8” Alex. Alex likes to joke that he is still growing himself at 35.

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