Paul Farmer and Haiti--book review

http://www.pih.org/whoweare/bio_paul.html

For my autobiography and biography project, I get to read books I would not necessarily pick up. This is turning out to be an unexpected gift. One of these books is Tracy Kidder's biography of Paul Farmer, called Mountains Beyond Mountains. Paul Farmer is a Harvard medical professor and anthropologist who also founded one of the most innovative medical clinics in one of the poorest places in Haiti. He and his organization Partners in Health are largely responsible for socially-responsible treatments for tuberculosis worldwide. Tracy K. likes Farmer and is irritated by him. Farmer does saintly things, but he is an annoying person too (how else could he get things done). He has an unswerving commitment to making the lives of poor people better, and he stops at nothing to do it.

It makes me think that all us profs should have a gig like Paul, where we work in our rich first-world schools for part of the year, and then for the rest of the year we work in development projects. Hmmm, I wonder how to swing this? One of the advantages of what Farmer does is that everyone can see how useful medical treatment is, although Farmer himself sees medical problems as social problems. And so he gets paid a lot and he doesn't have to work at his school all year. BUT, then he donates a lot of the money anyway.

Hmmm. I'm no superman like Paul Farmer, but I have resources other people might want. What if I invented an exchange programme for professors that allowed them to work in development projects...this bears thinking about.