From Mountains to Partners
Posted on May 7, 2010
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tracy Kidder recently penned the foreward to PIH co-founder Paul Farmer's new book, Partner to the Poor. Kidder's piece was recentely featured on the Daily Beast. Read an excerpt below:
 | |
Tracy Kidder | |
 | |
A few years back I wrote a book called Mountains Beyond Mountains. It has a subtitle: “The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World.” I don’t much like subtitles and I didn’t add this one willingly, but I suppose it’s accurate enough. My book is mostly about one person, Paul Farmer, and, as we all know, the old saw that one person can make a difference in this world really isn’t the whole truth. Paul Farmer never wanted me to imagine that he alone was responsible for the early work of Partners in Health. In fact, I think that if he’d been the writer, he would have given equal time to all the people involved in the early days—to Tom White, and Jim Yong Kim, and Fritz Lafontant, and Ophelia Dahl, and Loune Viaud, and Todd McCormack, and Haun Saussy, and the rest of a cast of at least dozens. But I have to add that I couldn’t have written a book like that, and I’m glad I didn’t try.
I traveled quite a lot with Paul Farmer, and some of those trips were, collectively, like a harrowing of hell for me—to the famished, deforested Central Plateau of Haiti; to a periurban slum outside Lima, Peru, which, as the residents say, looks like the surface of the moon; to Moscow’s Central Prison, where what the doctors described as an “uncrowded cell” contained 50 patients coughing up drug-resistant TB bacilli. In those places, particularly, Paul Farmer showed me more reasons for despair than I’ve ever seen before, or indeed imagined. And yet it was the most exhilarating experience of my life. PIH was still pretty small then, back in 2000, and yet they were creating vivid proof that diseases that could be treated successfully in the developed world could also be treated successfully and economically in some of the poorest, most difficult settings imaginable. That was the moving thing for me. Seeing the proof.
Read Tracy Kidder's full foreword to Partner to the Poor on the Daily Beast and purchase your own copy of the book from amazon.com. A portion of the book proceeds will help support PIH's work.
Purchase Tracy Kidder's best-selling book Mountains Beyond Mountains.
