More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
There’s no running water of any kind in our house. In the yard, we—like all the families on our street—have a well. Sometimes, I lean over the edge, staring down into the darkness, feeling the cool, wet air on my skin. In the summer, this well becomes our refrigerator. We lower our food to the water’s edge to keep it from spoiling. In the winter months, the whole house becomes our refrigerator (in the coldest months, we store eggs beneath our beds to keep them from freezing).
On the rare occasions when our family chooses to cook one of our precious chickens, we chase that bird down with a broom and scoop it up. We wash dishes and clothes by hand.
It wasn’t just vaccines that we had access to. Sometimes the whole school, or entire classes, would walk en masse to the dentist or to the pediatrician or to get our lungs x-rayed to find those with tuberculosis. Nobody resisted, nobody argued, nobody suggested that healthcare and education should be compartmentalized or that vaccines had no place
Before the year is out, our class will write a letter to Szent-Györgyi in America. We don’t have the scientist’s address, and can’t think of a way to find it, so we address the envelope with only two lines: Albert Szent-Györgyi USA
I returned to work, and from that moment forward, I kept my pace up. No matter how sick I felt, I kept going. I never allowed myself to back off.
Do not blame. Focus on what you can control. Transform bad stress into good stress.
