This is Planet Money from NPR.

This is a story of two groups of people doing life-saving work in totally different ways.

One group up close with their hands and the other with numbers at a desk.

That first group provides basic health care and medical supplies in the far north

region of Cameroon. Their doctors and nurses give vaccines, they monitor pregnancies,

train patients to look out for signs of malnutrition with tools as simple as a little piece

of tape, like a measuring tape with red, yellow, and green on it.

So a mom can wrap it around her kid's arm and measure whether her kid is malnourished.

So it's a very easy-to-use tool that we train the mothers to use on their children

so that they get to identify malnutrition very early.

Madeline Tronto manages grants for the organization called Alima.

It's an acronym.

It stands for the Alliance for International Medical Action.

Last year in Cameroon, Alima treated almost 400,000 people.

Alima has been able to do this work by staying far out of the fray during an armed conflict

that has been going on for years,

by building trust and also by managing difficult logistics.

Sometimes there's no road.

You face potential attacks.

It's scary. It's dangerous.

To continue that work, Lima's Cameroon program was supposed to get $1.9 million

this year from USAID. When the Trump administration announced it was gutting USAID, Madeline had just

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