HW 22 - Illness & Dying Book Part 1

Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains, Random House, 2003

Precis: Paul Farmer, also referred to as Dokte Paul. Was born with a gift, he possesses the gift of healing. Instead of using this gift for his own personal gain, he lives in Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world for 8 months out of the year, where he runs a hospital. Specializing in Infections Diseases, he is working with as many people as he can to slowly restore the health of the population of Haiti. Since he came there, no one has died of Tuberculosis in 12 years in his hospitals catchment area. His hospital is run off of donations, although he does charge a fee of 8 cents to all of the patients, unless they are wounded, sick, elderly, women or children. All else have to pay though. If his patients do not come for a check up, he will go out and find then, which sometimes include climbing mountains. He said to me once that he keeps working because there is always some one who needs treatment but isn't getting it. I guess that just shows what kind of man he really is.

Quotes:

1. "No one else, not at this time, is treating impoverished Haitians with the new antiretroviral drugs. Indeed, almost no one in any poor country is treating poor people who have the disease." (p.24)
2. "Look at you bourgeois people watching TV! Farmer says. The patients laugh. One of the young men looks up at him. No, Dokte Paul, not bourgeois. If we were bourgeois, we would have an antenna." (p.31)
3. Joe seemed glad to see him, as well as the present. As Farmer was leaving the shelter, he heard Joe say to another resident, just loudly enough to make Farmer wonder if Joe meant for him to overhear, "That guy's a fuckin saint." (p.16)
4. "My local hospital in Massachusetts was treating about 175,00 patients a year and had an annual operating budget of a$60 million. In 1999 Zanmi Lasante had treated roughly the same number of people, at the medical complex and out in the communities, and spent about $1.5 million, half of that in the form of donated drugs." (p.22).

In contrast to the "American way of life," Haitians live pretty poorly. They beg for food and live on what they can in a day to day manner. There was a part of this book where a woman came into the hospital with gangrene infecting her hand because it had been 15 days since she got the initial infection. In America we don't have to worry about that, we go to the doctor when we have pain in our knees or we take an aspirin if we have a headache, they have to tough it out. There will always be the people who truly upset by these inequalities, but how many of them are qualified enough to actually do anything, almost anyone can throw money at a problem, that is the american way, but it takes a truly remarkable man to actually make a difference. If there were a million more people who were just as qualified and dedicated as Dr. Paul Farmer, then there would be a whole lot less problems in the world. But there aren't so the men who are like him look that much more remarkable because of all the things they are willing to sacrifice to try to improve the world around them. Reading about what he does makes me want to change the world, but where do we start? Where is the line between wanting to help so we donate money, and actually donating ourselves to a cause that we really believe in? Or is that the problem, we really just couldn't be bothered enough to actually have something we believe in.