Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder

Author:Tracy Kidder
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781588363343
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-01-07T10:00:00+00:00

Jim Kim tried rhetoric first in the opening speech the next day. Many people had asked him, he told the crowd, why a little organization like PIH had taken on such a costly and difficult task in Peru. They were right to wonder. “We actually had to make a choice that we would not feed four thousand more children in Haiti perhaps. And if any of you have been to Haiti, there’s hardly anything more morally compelling than the situation of landless peasants in the central plateau.”

But, Jim went on, they’d had “a dream”: “the dream that someday we might sit in this room.” That there might be “a TB All-Star Weekend.” He said, “We took on this project because we thought that by proving that one could do community-based treatment of multidrug-resistant TB, that we might have the opportunity to work with a roomful of people like you. To actually expand resources to a problem that afflicts the populations we serve.”

Other speakers had talked about the need to generate “political will” for treating TB, as if each country had to solve its own problem. But, Jim said, political will was hardly the issue in a place such as Zaire, whose most recent president had stolen about 30 percent of the money loaned by foreign governments and the World Bank. For places like Zaire, money to deal with TB and MDR-TB would have to come from elsewhere. “There are more billionaires today than ever before,” Jim declared. “We are talking about wealth that we’ve never seen before. And the only time that I hear talk of shrinking resources among people like us, among academics, is when we talk about things that have to do with poor people.” The PIH project in Peru could be replicated, and some of what was needed were endorsements from “academics with clout” and the support of “the TB community.”

Jim said, “And let me just conclude this, my brief remarks here at this TB All-Star Weekend, by paraphrasing someone of our tribe, of Paul’s tribe and my tribe of anthropologists. Margaret Mead once said, Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.” He paused. “Indeed, they are the only ones who ever have.”

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