Mountains Beyond Mountains-Tracy Kidder

As cheesy as it sounds, I really did have trouble putting this book down. A biography of Paul Farmer, who is a doctor and effective advocate of the poor, this impacted me for the better. Dr. Farmer has quite literally dedicated his life to serving the Haitian poor, along with projects in Peru, Russia, and Boston, among other places. His logic and motivation for doing so can not be contended with and left me feeling very inadequate. However, the message of the book embraces this inevitable by-product of reading about an inspirational life. It encourages us to not be intimidated by the scope of poverty and suffering to the point of ignoring it-rather to acknowledge it and do something, whatever we can, and admit the humanity of the poor and our responsibility to help them. I appreciated how the topic was addressed, citing misled rationalization that we all are guilty of from time to time such as: "the poor are poor, but they are happy that way (pobre pero feliz)," "the poor are poor because they are lazy, if they worked harder, they could be like us," and "I'm an American, I don't have to deal with this." All of these are shameful ways we detatch and ignore the fact that the world's poor oftentimes don't have the opportunity to advance out of poverty or even to live. Dr. Farmer's primary work is leveling the right to life playing field and addressing the "pathogenesis of poverty." This book helps us look out of our comfortable materialistic bubble to the reality of suffering and our ability to alleviate it to some degree.

Some good links to organizations that actively address poverty/health issues:

Dr. Farmer's organization:
http://www.pih.org/home.html

Doctors Without Borders:
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/

Microcredit organizations (I love these, another post, another day):
Unitus
Grameen Foundation
FINCA