20894: radtimes: Tireless doctor a hero in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Tireless doctor a hero in Haiti

http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/LondonFreePress/Today/2004/03/27/397574.html

by Connie Woodcock, Special to The Free Press
2004-03-27

Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer
By Tracy Kidder
Random House, $37.95

The news from Haiti is almost always bad, but never so bad it can't get
worse. It's been that way for the last 200 years and so it is again as the
small, poverty-stricken Caribbean nation sinks into chaos, its president
having fled, and the rebels installing themselves.

Everything that goes around comes around and in Haiti revolution and chaos
are seldom far away. Even in normal times, life is fragile there, but we've
heard it so often, we're desensitized.

A recent book by Tracy Kidder makes timely reading right now. The short
title is Mountains Beyond Mountains, subtitled The Quest of Dr. Paul
Farmer, and with a sub-subtitle, A Man Who Would Cure the World.

Kidder pretty well invented fly-on-the-wall nonfiction. He's the Pulitzer
Prize-winning author of The Soul of a New Machine, House and Hometown,
books that tell the big story by focusing in tightly on one or a few
individuals.

I had carefully avoided Kidder's books over the years. No reason, really.
Just didn't ever feel like it. Words like "Pulitzer prize-winning author"
put me off. But shortly after starting Mountains Beyond Mountains, I
realized I've been missing out on a truly great storyteller and will have
to do some catching up.

The title comes from an old Haitian proverb: "Beyond mountains, there are
mountains," which means that no sooner do you solve one problem, than a new
problem reveals itself and you must solve it too.

The book focuses on Farmer, a renowned Boston doctor and Harvard medical
school professor, himself raised in poverty, whose unfailing enthusiasm has
brought hope to the poorest people in the western hemisphere. He's built
clinics, treated AIDS and brought fresh water and health care to thousands.

He has also travelled thousands of miles to lobby world health
organizations and to raise funds. And he does it without ever seeming to
run out of either energy or enthusiasm.

On top of all that, he makes house calls -- both in Boston and in the
Haitian hills.

Farmer is one of this planet's great givers, both of medical care and of
hope, without being saintly about it. Kidder shows him to be a brilliant
guy, determined to change the world. He's devoted much of his life and
genius to the poorest of the poor.

Kidder met "Dokte Paul" in the early 1990s, when he went to Haiti as a
reporter covering the American troops who were reinstating the
democratically elected government and getting rid of the military junta
that had been ruling the country. They met when the headless body of a
local official had been fished out of a river and the Americans were about
to release a man who the residents knew was the killer. Said Farmer, "It's
hard to live in Haiti and not know who cut off someone's head."

Jean Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's recently deposed elected leader, makes a
couple of appearances in Mountains Beyond Mountains. Farmer met him when
Aristide was still a priest preaching liberation theology and fighting for
the poor. When Farmer heard he was running for the presidency he was horrified.

"How could he participate in something as irremediably filthy as Haitian
politics?" he wrote in his journal. But then he realized Haitians were
demanding that he run. "Perhaps this is a singular chance to change Haiti."
Wrong. Not in the long term, apparently.

Kidder's technique involves interviewing every person who ever had contact
with Farmer, as well as dogging his footsteps for months -- showing us a
man with a strong faith who goes about his daily work among Haiti's ill and
malnourished, telling himself -- asking himself -- over and over, "Surely
someone is witnessing this horror show?"

Trying to keep up with him, Kidder wondered how he managed to keep going,
given his frequent "sleepless nights, his 100-hour weeks, his incessant
travel."

"The problem is," replied Farmer simply, "if I don't work this hard,
someone will die who doesn't have to."

.