I picked this up as an audio book at the Bookmobile. It is short, only four audio discs, and I wish it were longer. I had read part of a book by Paul Farmer (which was much more dense) in a class several years ago, and I’ve been interested ever since. What impressed me years ago, and then again in this book, is that so few of us really know the badness of oppression and neglect that the world’s poor suffer. Farmer knows it firsthand, and has a heart not only to make it known but to cure it.
The realities in this book might equally be represented in World Health Organization reports. However, Kidder’s colourful images of the doctor, his life and his patients, makes those numbers stick to the conscience much better.
Haitian farmers whose livelihoods were lost because of an American hydro-power development, citizens beaten for the least flicker of dissent, a whole nation resigned to misfortune. All of this becomes more clear when they are being treated by a world-leading doctor who truly cares.
There is some amount of swearing in the book, as Farmer struggles to express his frustration at injustice and first-world misunderstanding. There is also a grasping for the holiness of God, who cares for the infinite worth of each individual, no matter how poor, and in whom even forsaken people hope.
The final scene was the most applicable to my life: Farmer and the author hiking all day over mountains to care for a family of peasants, and helping others as they go. The significance is that in spending the day hiking, there are countless things that Farmer is not accomplishing. “Wherever Paul is, he is not somewhere else,” his assistant Ophelia remarked earlier. Why would someone who has the brains and connections to tackle worldwide public health problems spend so much time trying to care for someone so “insignificant” in terms of global impact? On that same walk, the author questions Farmer about a recent rescue attempt, in which a teenaged boy was airlifted from Haiti to Boston at a cost of $20,000, soon to die in hospital there. Couldn’t that $20,000 have been better spent to help more people?
Farmer’s responses to this question are intriguing. First, he says it is a bad question. There are so many other ways of questioning the same situation: e.g., why are doctors in North America paid so much when only $20,000 could possibly save that boy’s life? But then Farmer goes deeper, describing his basic approach to worldwide medical reform: he views himself as fighting a long defeat. Things will get worse, people will die, etc. At least he can do some good in the meantime. Sure, maybe Farmer will win, as some recent successes have hinted, but it is in embracing this path to defeat that individual people can really receive the care they deserve. After all, it was only because Farmer first learned to care about hopeless individual people and hopeless individual cases that his career ever amounted to anything.
Those reflections are very pertinent to me as a pastor. I’ve been thinking a lot lately that everything I do means not doing something else. Farmer’s example is encouraging: embrace the defeat and go ahead and care for non-strategic people. There is something of Christ’s cross in that.
WhatPastorSamIsReading 