Mountains beyond mountains

So I just finished the book Mountains Beyond Mountains and I would like to make a recommendation to everyone: Read this book! After reading Tracy Kidder’s narrative nonfiction account of Dr. Paul Farmer and his mission to serve the poor and fight for justice in our world I feel convicted to find a way to follow in his foot steps. I raced through the book gulping down this amazingly encouraging and at the same time discouraging story about one man’s effort in fighting a battle that, in the world’s eyes, is doomed to failure. Perhaps the strongest message that I was able to extrapolate from this book was Farmer’s own theory on the connection between the 1^st and 3^rd worlds. The belief that most citizens of the 1^st world have—either consciously or subconsciously—is that the two worlds function in parallel; that is, what happens in the 1^st world bears no relation to what happens in the 3^rd world. Farmer’s entire philosophy, what he calls O for P or Opting for the Poor, is founded on his unwavering belief that what happens in the 1^st world is directly related to what happens in the 3^rd world. To put it more bluntly, the relatively luxurious and privileged lives that we live in America come at the cost of the lives of people in places like Haiti.

After reading through the book, I am finding it incredibly difficulty to digest it all. Perhaps the hardest part of getting through this book is facing the moral imperative that Farmer embodies in his life’s work, that is: the value of life is the same regardless of who it is and what country they happen to reside in and if there is something you can do to change it then you have a moral obligation to do something about it. This message is a particularly hard one to swallow because responsibility and blame cannot be so easily shifted onto some third party—we are all responsible because the world is inevitably interconnected. This moral challenge has forced me to rethink the way I live my entire life, from the things I choose to eat to my choice of future career. To think that there is someone like Paul Farmer out there who basically lives and breathes so that he can fight poverty by combating the diseases that afflict them is both comforting and unsettling. It is unsettling because his life is a statement in opposition to the majority’s resignation, “You can’t save the world even if you wanted to, plus it isn’t our responsibility anyways.” Once I was able to get past this simple defense mechanism I realized that his example proves that what he can do I can do; the challenge is whether or not I am willing to step up to the challenge and bear some of the responsibility.

I am in Berlin, Germany right now ruminating over the simple, yet uneasy to digest, wisdom of a humble doctor. I have gone to see some museums and performances, but in light of what I’ve just experienced through this book, I can’t find it in me to write about them. I suspect that the rest of my time in Germany will be spent soul-searching, trying to discern my calling in life and searching for my own answer to this moral dilemma of extreme poverty and extreme wealth coexisting in the same world. Boy... who said living was easy?

On a side note, after much deliberating, I have decided to stay in America upon graduation and to find work near home or perhaps near school. As of now teaching is looking quite attractive to me, but nothing is set in stone. My time abroad has revealed to me my own physical limits and has forced me to downsize my own overreaching ambition. It has been and will continue to be a very humbling experience.