“What does that say about us?”
by Fran Quigley Aug 17, 2005
Profiler of global health hero to speak at Butler
Tracy Kidder wants to reassure the incoming Butler University freshmen, and their counterparts at some 20 other colleges and universities in the U.S., who share as their first college reading assignment Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains.
Even though they will be reading the story of Dr. Paul Farmer, who the subtitle identifies unsubtly as “A Man Who Would Cure the World,” no one is expecting the new collegians to completely follow Farmer’s lead. The book portrays Farmer as the epitome of self-sacrifice, going without sleep, creature comforts and even food in order to treat as many poor people around the globe for infectious diseases as he and his Partners In Health colleagues can manage.
“The guy is a f—ing saint,” says one of Farmer’s U.S. patients with HIV. Even though Farmer resists that label, as does Kidder, the author acknowledges the good doctor does set the virtue bar pretty darn high.
“For most Americans — me included — it is inconceivable to try to reproduce his personal model,” Kidder says. “But if some of the barriers to providing health care were lowered just a bit, these kinds of heroic efforts would not be necessary. I think Paul Farmer himself would say that we all don’t have to imitate his life, we just need to do something to help out the people he is treating.”
Kidder, the winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Soul of a New Machine, and the author of non-fiction works Among Schoolchildren, Old Friends and Home Town, will be speaking to those Butler students on Aug. 22 at 9:30 a.m. at Clowes Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
For Kidder, it turned out to be impossible to write this latest book without acknowledging his own admiration for Farmer’s and Partners in Health’s work fighting to stem the tragedy of millions of people dying each year from treatable diseases like HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. “The PIH people left their books open to me. I spent a lot of time with Farmer and people who know him,” Kidder says. “I’m absolutely convinced this organization is for real, so I finally concluded that I am happy to proselytize for them.”
The backdrop for most of the book, and the source of much of its drama, is Haiti, the site of PIH’s first clinic in Cange and the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. (The title Mountains Beyond Mountains is derived from a Haitian proverb about endless challenge.) Farmer has written a book, The Uses of Haiti, that is sharply critical of the U.S. role in Haitian suffering, and Kidder shares his subject’s anger.
“The U.S. created the conditions that led to a coup d’état,” Kidder says, referring to the February 2004 removal of democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his replacement by a U.S.-backed government that is rapidly compiling a horrific human rights record. “It’s wrong to say the Haitians are not partly responsible for the mess. But it’s equally wrong not to recognize that the U.S. is the dominant power down there.”
So, even though he isn’t asking the Butler freshmen or other readers to personally imitate Farmer’s heroics, Kidder insists the book contains a lesson for every comparatively wealthy American living in an era where over 30,000 children are dying each day from preventable disease and hunger, yet the U.S. has found nearly $200 billion to prosecute a war in Iraq.
“Before I met Farmer and the Partners in Health people, I skipped over newspaper articles about the AIDS pandemic,” Kidder says. “The problem was just too big and too horrible. Then, suddenly, I was with people who said, ‘It’s not too big to solve, and here’s the proof.’ And there it was, in the clinic in Cange. Farmer is showing us that we can treat these people and solve this problem. Yet we choose not to.
“What does that say about us?”
Sounds like a good question to pose at the start of a collegiate career.
To learn more about, or contribute to, Partners in Health, go to www.pih.org. Tracy Kidder’s new book, My Detachment, will be published by Random House in September.
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