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Spreading The Word |
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Written by Eric McHenry
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Page 4 of 4 Doctor Without Borders
Paul Farmer has trouble sitting still. By his second year of medical school, he was already taking such frequent trips to Haiti that his classmates were calling him “Paul Foreigner.” And he still keeps what literary journalist Tracy Kidder describes as “a lunatic schedule.” The easiest way to talk to him on the phone is to catch him in a car, which is what I did on June 15. He’d returned to Boston that morning on a red-eye flight from Seattle. The next morning he’d be flying to Russia for a week, then on to Rwanda for the rest of the summer.—Eric McHenry
 Photo courtesy of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston.
I’ve got one word for you: Africa. That’s where we belong. That’s where the need is greatest, and I think that’s where we can make our greatest contribution.
What are your projects in Africa? AIDS and tuberculosis?
An even higher priority than that is working with the public-health sector to strengthen basic, primary health care. Now to Partners in Health that includes AIDS and tuberculosis and women’s health and a whole passel of things. Sometimes we use the cover of one or two diseases to strengthen our work promoting basic rights, because that’s what we’re really about. We don’t always talk that way, but we’re about basic human rights: the right to health care, the right to clean water, the right to primary education. We’re doing all those things in Rwanda.
If you talked about it more explicitly in those terms, would you risk politicizing it in a way that might affect your funding? So you focus on the diseases because it’s more practical?
Yeah. Sometimes I do that. Although I always write about this explicitly in rights terms. But then again, no one but my mother reads my books.
Speaking of books, can you confidently say at this point that the publication of Mountains Beyond Mountains has helped Partners in Health?
Oh yeah, that’s for sure.
Tracy Kidder told me you were somewhat ambivalent about the book. And I’m sure that that kind of publicity is a double-edged sword. In retrospect, does it seem like a project that has dovetailed well with the goals of Partners in Health?
It’s dovetailed well with Partners in Health and its goals, yes. In terms of dovetailing with one’s personal ambitions, I’m glad Tracy told you and not me. I was uncomfortable with it. I took one for the team. But you know, he’s great company, and he certainly introduced the drama of what’s going on with the destitute sick in a way that I could not have done, and, evidently, very few other people could have done.
When you say you took one for the team…?
I’m sort of joking. Let me put it this way: A narrative journalist has to tell a story that involves a small number of characters, otherwise he or she loses the reader, right? But we are hundreds of us working together. In fact, there are 4,000 people working for Partners in Health now. Most of them are community health workers. Most of them are Haitian. I know what it feels like to work as part of a big team. And some people will read Kidder’s book and say—you know, I think it’s even on the jacket somewhere—“one person can have extraordinary force in the world.” And I say, “No, no, that’s not at all the case. You have to work with lots of people to have impact in the world.”
You’ve just returned from a meeting with the Gates Foundation, which has been a big source of support for Partners in Health.
They performed CPR on international health, let me tell you. They really did. They brought it back from the dead. It’s so much better now than even five or six years ago. One of the big problems in international health was that there were so few resources available that people had begun setting their sights lower and lower—people in my field. “We can’t do this. We can’t do that. We can only do this.” Sorry, but you can’t walk into an impoverished village in the middle of Rwanda and say, “Okay, what are the cost-effective ways to intervene here?” Sometimes you have to invest very heavily in rebuilding infrastructure and making sure that whatever ails people is what you address. And that’s what we’ve done in Rwanda.
How do you feel about the book being chosen as a “common book” -- not just by the University of Washington, but by all these secondary schools and colleges and universities and communities?
I’m very honored, because one, I’m a teacher, and two, I was a student activist. What we want to see is students—high school students, college students—getting involved in these issues. I’m thrilled about that. I decided I would go to Haiti as an undergraduate. And that’s something I really enjoy saying to students: “Hey, you can do stuff in college that can become a whole lifetime’s work for you, if you’re lucky.”
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