I am reading Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. Random House Inc. published it in 2003, but excerpts from the book were originally published in the New York Times. It is a New York Times Bestseller and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
For three years I traveled with Paul Farmer, who is a doctor in the fullest and perhaps most unusual sense of the word. Paul Farmer started PIH (Partners In Health) 1987 with the help of close friends, and it blossomed into a global, fully staffed organization that works to help the poor communities in Peru, Haiti, Boston, and Russia. PIH focuses on patients afflicted with Tuberculosis, Human Immunodeficiency Virus, and Multiple Drug Resistance, but this focus leads to extensive attempts at transforming the patients’ ways of living, and even their country. For example, Haitians that drink impure water or Russian prisoners living with HIV positive and Bacilli ridden in-mates are much more likely to develop a or suffer worsened disease than a those with sanitary cells or wells. Both PIH and Farmer operate with the attitude that all patients deserve to be healed and maximally helped, regardless of their home, their political standpoint, their ability to pay, the severity of their disease, or their health history.
Doing whatever it takes to heal a patient (like hiking through mountainous terrain for seven hours to visit a patient or providing concrete floors, solid roofs, Canadian crutches, a flight from Haiti to Boston, a radio, a $20,000 treatment) is disputed by many other doctors and government officials. PIH and Farmer are criticized for acting unsustainably or with economical inefficiency, but they continue to focus on the individual patient with the money they have, rather than solving the issue of the sick and dying with a superficial, incomplete, “cost efficient” health plan. Farmer is an empathetic, and natural leader, doctor, friend, father, professor, and husband who has dedicated his life to helping the needy. Despite constantly working in situations filled with despair and utter grief, Farmer refuses to feel hopeless, stop helping the poor long enough to sleep or eat, find a less stressful profession, or give up.
“But he’d always return to Cange. It seemed to me that he didn’t have a plan for his life so much as he had a pattern. He was like a compass, with one let swinging around the globe and the other planted in Haiti” (page 260). Farmer is unusual in that he has a purpose, but no specific plan. He takes on each patient, flight, email, and need day by day. His pattern of traveling is seemingly unpredictable, except that he wishes he was in Haiti when he’s not in Haiti. That is his most home-like “nest”.
“It’s so easy, as least for me, to mistake a person’s material resources for his interior ones” (page 274). I think that Kidder means that it is instinctual to judge others based on a first glance at their ability to help. It is easy to forget that there is more to someone than what they have. Potential is invisible, unless time is taken to see it.
“I’ve never found it easy to trust another person to lead me anywhere, but I trust Farmer” (page 284). This quote reveals Farmer’s ability to lead others. Being a leader requires trust from the followers, and Farmer is obviously trustworthy to those around him. Even Tracy Kidder, who is not naturally trusting, is confident in Farmer’s ability to lead him to safety and comfort.
In all societies, I see that health is a struggle. I do not know anyone is effortlessly healthy in every respect, or who has never been sick or injured. In my culture, people must make a conscious effort to maintain healthy habits. In Haiti and other impoverished countries, such healthy habits are nearly unattainable because resources like medicine, education, housing and money are difficult to come by. Thus, an expensive procedure and treatment like John’s in Chapter 25 was perceived as a miracle by his fellow Hatians. Health in Haiti equates to having enough, whereas remaining fit for me and many others often requires avoidance. We must avoid habits that negate health, like smoking, overeating, or couch potato-ism. Where they have to little, we have too much. Where they struggle with the idea of “enough”, we struggle with greed. Both countries contain illness, but manner in which people approach it is different because of this difference in resources.
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