O for the P
I just finished reading Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World. I’ve known of the book for a couple years but never quite got around to reading it, likely because I knew it would challenge me. After the Haitian earthquake about a month ago, I remembered the book, decided I must read it, and then Barnes & Noble had it on sale. So here I am.
In the early 1980′s, Dr. Farmer visited Haiti and decided to dedicate his life to helping the Haitian poor. He founded his own hospital and community health system in Cange, one of the poorest towns in the poorest regions of Haiti, the most impoverished country in the western hemisphere. This enterprise, Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health, or PIH) is now active in several other countries worldwide, and Farmer pioneered more successful approaches to controlling TB, HIV, and other infectious diseases in third-world countries.
