Mountains Beyond Mountains Chs 5-8 Reflection by Jessica Puricelli

Have you ever had one of those moments where you are listening to a song and it seems to fit in exactly with what you are going through? Come on, you know what I’m talking about…. When the lyrics are spot on with how you are feeling and the beat is just right – before you know it, all the drivers around you are staring in your car because you are getting really into it, belting the song as loud as you possibly can, both hands gripped to the steering wheel….

This is exactly how I felt reading chapters 5-8 of Mountains Beyond Mountains. Recently, I have really been trying to find my vocation. No small task for a 20 year old! How in the world are we supposed to decide right now what we want to be doing for the rest of our lives? When I read the first sentence of Chapter 5 – “It was impossible to spend any time with Farmer and not wonder how he happened to choose this life” (48). – I thought to myself, Here it is! Finally some answers to how I should choose my direction!

Here’s what I learned about Paul Farmer when he was about my age: (1) “….he didn’t get straight A’s his first semester of college” (55) (extremely encouraging J), (2) there was a period when “to some of the family, it seemed that [he] might be making that customary American right of passage and turning his back on them” (55),  and (3) he craved his family’s, especially his father’s, approval (56). These all seemed to me to be pretty regular experiences for college kids. There had to be something more! Then I found it--the teachings and ideas of Rudolph Virchow, Gustavo Gutierrez’s liberation theology, Haiti’s history (which reminded him of Lord of the Rings), Latin American culture--Paul Farmer was receptive to the things that caught his attention, and when he found these things, he explored them to the fullest! He capitalized on these things that interested and excited him and based his whole life on them. My first thought was “Wow, that’s risky!” But why should it be? After all, it only makes sense that whatever we do in life, it be founded in things that excite us!

I felt that Farmer’s sympathy when he said, “I’d like to be able to say that when I was young I lived in a trailer park, picked fruit with Haitians, got interested in migrant farmworkers, and went to Latin America. All true, but not the truth. We’re asked to have tidy biographies that are coherent. Everyone does that. But the fact is, a perfectly discrepant version has the same ending” (54). As a college student, I feel all kinds of pressures about figuring out what it is that I want to do, but maybe I should work toward removing myself from these pressures. Maybe instead of worrying so much about planning my future, I should relish in the fact that I don’t know what is coming next. I should focus on figuring out what it is that I love, and run with it. It worked for Paul Farmer, why shouldn’t it work for anyone else? Passion and a good work ethic – seems like a recipe for success to me!

      On a completely unrelated note, I do want to point out a quote from Chapter 6 that really caught my eye: “He’d imagined something different—a hospital at least partly devoted to training Haitians to treat Haitians” (65). I love this notion of teaching the people so they can help themselves. I feel like so often when it comes to global health, there is such a focus on what we can do to alleviate discrepancies that we become transformed into heroes. Last time I checked, though, I didn’t have any super powers. We are all human. Catholic Social Teaching distinguishes between working for a people and working with a people. When approaching issues of global health, I strongly believe it can only be approached through the latter thinking. That is one of the most incredible thing about GlobeMed for me—it does not involve dropping off a duffle bag full of medicine or making a mission trip that offers only temporary improvement, but rather, it is principled in forming a relationship, which mandates the attitude that we are working with our partner.