Minds may move mountains, but there will always be more mountains beyond mountains for the mind to move.
This was the message imparted by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tracy Kidder during his speech Tuesday about the life and work of Dr. Paul Farmer, a physician, anthropologist and main character of Kidder’s well-renown book “Mountains Beyond Mountains.”
Kidder told stories of his lengthy history and friendship with Farmer to thousands of audience members at Matthew Knight Arena, reminiscing about the aid worker’s journey from Haiti’s muddy, poverty-stricken streets to the lofty skyscrapers and lecture halls of New York and Boston.
At age 27, Farmer helped found the Boston-based non-profit health care organization Partners in Health, working in a dozen developing nations to build or refurbish more than 60 hospitals.
The author attempted to define what it was about Farmer that made him such a powerful humanitarian and international symbol of amnesty and empathy. He told stories and showed photos of Haitians and Burundians stricken with life-threatening cases of tuberculosis and cholera, whose immense suffering and dismal livelihoods were, in his own words, indirect effects of the consumerism and wasteful luxury implicit in Western society.
“I found myself trying to reconcile the fact of Haiti with my own privileged American upbringing,” Kidder said. “If we are honest, we have to admit that some of our privilege has been built (by) the creation of misery elsewhere.”
Kidder also spoke about the trials and tribulations he faced while writing Farmer’s biographical novel, describing the long days he spent with the doctor and the “problem of goodness” he experienced while trying to document the life of a man who seemed unable to do wrong.
“After a while, you have to ask yourself, ‘What’s the catch?’” Kidder said. “And I looked for (his) enemies, but I only found a few credible critics.”
Throughout his attempts to capture the doctor’s personality, Kidder could not find a fault with Farmer. In the author’s eyes, he was the perfect example of a magnanimous spirit endowed with an endless capacity for selflessness. When it finally came time to write “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” Kidder said he tried to relay compelling stories about the mortal struggles of Haiti’s rural poor and the efforts being taken to help.
“I tried to make the writing vivid,” Kidder said. “Not flashy, buy vivid. I wanted to make my readers feel they were following a small square of light in so much darkness.”
Halfway into his lecture, Kidder queued up a short slideshow of his exploits to various Third World countries. The audience gasped as one slide came into focus depicting an 11-year-old Haitian boy named Alcante lying upright on a hospital bed staring at the camera through hollow eyes, his ribs stretched tight against the skin of his stomach like a drumhead.
“In this picture he is dying from a disseminating (form) of T.B.,” Kidder said.
However, with the help of local doctors and new-age medicine, Kidder said, Alcante survived the debilitating disease.
“He is a young man now,” the author added, evoking gasps of relief from the audience.
Kidder touched on another conversation he had with Farmer during which the author discovered the doctor’s seminal experience that would steer his efforts ever since. While serving in Haiti, Farmer tended to a pregnant woman stricken with malaria who came to the hospital where he worked. Upon learning that the woman needed a blood transfusion, her sister decided to set out for the impoverished Caribbean county’s capitol to buy blood.
Touched by the family’s plight, Farmer rounded up $15 in donations from other patients and doctors and gave the money to the sister, wishing her luck.
“It turned out that $15 wasn’t enough for transportation costs and blood,” Kidder said. “There wasn’t much for her to do but stand there and watch her pregnant sister die.”
In the end, Kidder said, it was Farmer’s experiences with the “misery, unnecessary sickness and death” all too common in the Third World that drove him to such benevolent acts of faith.
“It is important to pay attention to the world as it really is,” Kidder said. “Don’t forget about the forgotten people in the world. A small group of people can improve the world.”
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