The most important book I read last year was Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains. Do yourself a huge favor & order this book today - you won't be able to stop flipping the pages in order to read the quite provocative story of Dr. Paul Farmer & his fellow laborers in health like Jim Yong Kim (now the president of my alma mater). And it just may inspire some of you to do something entirely audacious & beautiful for the impoverished people groups of our world. Pray - yes, of course. But better yet, become an answer to someone else's prayers.
Here's Kidder's article:
"THOSE who know a little of Haiti’s history might have watched the news last night and thought, as I did for a moment: “An earthquake? What next? Poor Haiti is cursed.”
But while earthquakes are acts of nature, extreme vulnerability to earthquakes is manmade. And the history of Haiti’s vulnerability to natural disasters — to floods and famine and disease as well as to this terrible earthquake — is long and complex, but the essence of it seems clear enough.
Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted. (In more recent years American administrations fell into a pattern of promoting and then undermining Haitian constitutional democracy.)" Read the rest of the article here.
