Tracy Kidder to Talk on Health Efforts in Haiti
KEENE, N.H. 2/13/06 - Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder will speak in the Mabel Brown Room of Keene State College’s L. P. Young Student Center at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 23. This event is free and open to the public.
In his remarks - entitled “Tout Moun Se Moun,” (Haitian creole for “we’re all human beings”) - Kidder will share some images of Haiti and reflect on his coming to know and write about the work of Dr. Paul Farmer of the international organization Partners in Health. Mountains Beyond Mountains, which is about Farmer’s humanitarian work, was Keene State College’s summer reading title for incoming students last fall.
Paul Farmer is a doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, and founder of Partners in Health. He first visited Haiti as a medical student and was appalled at the widespread incidence of tuberculosis and typhoid - rarely seen in the West - and the lack of health services for the poor. He returned to Haiti determined to offer health care to the poorest people - at first simply by making house calls to remote villages in the mountains.
In 1983, he helped establish a community-based health project in the village of Cange. Four years later, Farmer, Thomas J. White, and Todd McCormack founded Partners Health to develop clinics, a training program for health outreach workers, and a mobile unit to screen residents of area villages for preventable diseases.
Kidder met Farmer in 1994, when Kidder was in Haiti to report on American soldiers working to reinstate Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government. Five years later, they met again, to write a profile about Farmer for The New Yorker (“The Good Doctor,” July 2000). Among Kidder’s books are The Soul of a New Machine (1982), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, House (1985), Among Schoolchildren (1989), Old Friends (1993), and Home Town (1999). He is a frequent contributor to the Atlantic Monthly magazine.
Please contact the Summer Reading Program coordinator, William Stroup of the KSC English department, at wstroup@keene.edu or 603-358-2692 for more information.
