Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

by Tracy Kidder

“Haitians believe in sorcery because their culture has evolved in the absence of effective medicine. So of course they believe in sorcery, in sicknesses that someone has sent to them. Why else would someone fall into a coma? And when someone is very sick and people are used to seeing them die with the same symptoms and you give them meds and they rapidly recover, people think. And then they start talking.” In his experience, most Haitians eagerly embrace effective medicine. He has dozens of Voodoo priests among his patients, some of them serving as virtual community health workers, bringing him ill parishioners. Sorcery is, at bottom, the Haitians’ way of explaining suffering, but the allegations themselves can cause suffering. Now an elderly woman enters Farmer’s office. She’s the subject of the sorcery consult. The other day in the courtyard Farmer saw her son moping around and asked him what was wrong. “My mother hates me,” he said. In fact, the mother believes her son “sent” the sickness that killed another son. As she sits down beside Farmer and he begins telling her not that sorcery doesn’t exist but that he knows sorcery wasn’t involved in this instance, she lifts her chin and averts her face. Gradually, she softens. But it will probably take months to reconcile her fully with her surviving son.