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

by Tracy Kidder

The world is full of miserable places. One way of living comfortably is not to think about them or, when you do, to send money.

An individual might exist in misery this great almost anywhere, but it was hard to imagine an entire community poorer and sicker than this.

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: “Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe,” in literal translation, “God gives but doesn’t share.” This meant, as Farmer would later explain it, “God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he’s not the one who’s supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.”

“Clean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floors, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.”

Multidrug-resistant TB tends to arise where wealth and poverty are mingled, where poor people get some treatment but not enough.