One of my favorite books is “Mountain beyond Mountains” by Tracy Kidder. With Haiti’s earthquake and human tragedy, let me share the quotes I captured from the book -
- There is a difference between managing wealth and managing health.
- Farmer denounced all ideologies, including his own, at least a little. “It’s an ology, after all,” he had written “And all ologies fail us at some point.”
- “It’s embarrassing that piddly little projects like ours should serve as exemplars. It’s only because other people haven’t been doing their jobs.”
- But standard notions of efficiency, notions about cost-effectiveness, about big people performing big jobs, haven’t worked so well themselves. In public health projects in difficult locales, theory often outruns practice. Individual patients get forgotten, and what seems like a small problem gets ignored, until it grows large, like MDR. “If you focus on individual patients, you can’t get sloppy.”
- If you do the right things well, you avoid futility. His patients tend to get better. They all get comforted. Doctoring is the ultimate source of power. His basic message is simple: This person is sick, and I am a doctor. Everyone, potentially, can understand and sympathize, since everyone knows or imagines sickness personally. And it can’t be hard for most people to imagine what it would be like to have no doctor, no hope for medicine. I think Farmer taps into a universal anxiety and also into fundamental place as some troubled consciences, into what he calls “ambivalence”, the often unacknowledged uneasiness that some of the fortunate feel about their place in the world, the thing he once told me he designed his life to avoid.
My others post on Haiti are “Are we incapable of complexity?” and “Resources are always limited”.
