Haiti and Dr Paul Farmer

Back in January, I was reading a book a friend lent me about the legendary Dr. Paul Farmer, who has spent decades working to bring better health care to the world's poor, primarily in Haiti.

Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains is a work of tremendous empathy, courage, passion and urgency that not only informs but inspires. Shadowing the doctor on his rounds that literally span the globe, Kidder paints a portrait of a person we can't help but want to emulate, in the process educating readers about the current and historical political realities that connect our countries and bring to light the ripple effects of some of the greatest wealth disparities on the planet. This portrait of a thoroughly dedicated healer of extraordinary depth makes it impossible to put the book down without a new resolve to better understand the labor/management dynamics of the world we live in and want to do our part in raising awareness and reducing the structural violence of the status quo.

Having finished Kidder's well-crafted and wonderfully, heartbreakingly complex book just as the horrific earthquake in Haiti took place, I felt compelled to read further about Haiti, especially from Paul Farmer's perspective. Farmer's The Uses of Haiti is not for the fainthearted, as it goes about describing the brutal colonization of Haiti and its extracted wealth since the first European settlement in the New World and the subsequent impoverishment of a land and people more unabashedly ravaged than most. Both Jonathan Kozol and Noam Chomsky in Farmer's book's Forward and Introduction express fears that Haiti's much neglected and shameful history, despite the impressive efforts of a number of writers, "is fated for oblivion"(Chomsky) or "consigned to the critical oblivion that
is reserved for books that threaten the accepted lies by which we live"(Kozol). That may be an accurate assessment, as Haiti fades from the radar screen of mainstream reporting, the seismic shift of political awareness and narrative following that of the earth, with its excruciatingly slow, but very unpredictable timetable.

These two works prick our conscience and shine a light on how creative, deep or shallow is our own resilience and solidarity with brothers and sisters, near and far, whose labors might otherwise be illegible and invisible to us in our relative privilege. In Farmer's update to the current edition of his book, there's a more thorough treatment of the drama of US interference in Haiti's affairs that helps explain to Americans what Haitians already know; that the road to liberation looks very much like "mountains beyond mountains" to those actually living beyond the sound-bites, living their multidimensional lives 'on the ground'. On the ground is where what heals and wounds is too complex for a colonizing sort of mind to appreciate, but easy enough for a human heart to break open and acknowledge.

--Lynn F.