Kaethe

I deliberately chose to read the "Adapted for Young People" version not because I dislike Tracy Kidder (on the contrary, I generally really enjoy his books) but because I knew this was a subject that would cause me to gnash my teeth, stomp my tiny feet, and rage and rage. Also, I was fully prepared for the idea that I wouldn't necessarily like Dr. Paul Farmer.

That's two to me.

Being broke is tough. Being poor when everyone you know is just as poor, and illiterate, and ill, as well as hungry, that's not merely tough, that's deadly. Paul Farmer met Haitian farmworkers while he was a student and Duke. By the time he'd completed his medical and anthropology training at Harvard he was already firmly established as the primary caregiver for the inhabitants of the central plateau of Haiti. Since then he has done astounding work in multi-drug resistant TB treatment and AIDs treatment among the poorest peoples in the world. He's developed widely repeated drug protocols as well as a much-copied healthcare clinic. Everyone should have such a caring and creative doctor.

And yes, sometimes he is annoying because he has eidetic memory, and only needs to sleep four hours a night, and he is banging his head against stupid bureaucracy, and poor logic, and the worst kind of social injustice, every single day.

He is, I think, a kind of living saint, a man who has thrown himself entirely and completely into looking after the sick, the poor, the imprisoned. And the authors make it clear that this is hard, hard work. Good on him. He should make us all feel uncomfortable and guilty, because no matter how much good we might do with our lives, we aren't doing as much good as he is.

Library copy.