MODULE FOUR: HEALTH CARE AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Paul Farmer in his book Pathologies of Power – Health, Human Rights, and the New War On Terror touches up on so many vital issues that plague nations, however seem to be poorly understood by the international community. His introductory comments are engaging right away as he distinguishes the different kinds of “knowing” an individual can have when assessing the qualities of lives of people in worst-off situations. I find it particularly interesting when Farmer points out the kinds of silences an individual can maintain; one, providing an account of the stoic nature of oppressed peoples which in a way is a silence, because Farmer points out it’s effective but “runs the risk of missing the great eloquence beneath the silence” (Farmer, 26). The other is to refrain oneself from reporting every little detail observed, as it is sometimes best to desist unearthing the pains and sufferings of individuals that come with the eloquence that lies under their own silence. I thoroughly agree with Farmer when he points out that “the two ways of knowing are not about understanding the details of the history of any given place, as important as they may be to getting the story right. The two ways of knowing […] are not about linguistic competence. To get beyond the first silence requires compassion and solidarity…” (Farmer, 27). This, I believe is the sole way of coming close to realizing the pains of people who have suffered through various human rights abuses, however as Farmer points out, the pain realized from “bearing witness” is incomparable to the actual pain felt by victims themselves.

Compassion and solidarity are, in the end, how humanity works. Nowadays it sometimes may feel that people are so caught up with their own daily struggles to realize the greater struggles of those not so fortunate such as Haitian victims like Acéphie describes in the first chapter of Farmer’s book. Struggles and oppression are likely to be presented in the form of statistical figures when trying to convey certain situations globally and by doing this the essential and the articulate details are simply lost. The actual experiences of suffering are not accounted by mere statistical figures. Farmer included a poem by Rebecca Chopp called The Praxis of Suffering in a chapter of his book which has the lines, “How can one really understand statistics / citing the deaths of six million Jews or graphs of third- world starvation? Do numbers really reveal the agony, / the interruption, the questions that these victims put to / the meaning and nature of our individual lives and life / as a whole?” (Farmer, 42). This, I feel so effectively portrays how statistics can be so inadequate. I feel that they may convey the overall terribleness of an event that may have occurred, but they hardly allow people to feel compassion or develop feelings of solidarity. Farmer uses thought-provoking poems to set the scene for what he discusses in his book.

Farmers relates Acéphie’s story in the first chapter of his book and I felt that it was a striking example of the vicious cycle poverty and occupying the lowest rung of society can bring about. In poorer countries like Haiti where infrastructure is pitiable the underprivileged really are stuck in situations where one bad thing may lead to worst. In her case, she ended up with AIDS and her family was worst off than before.

Overall, I feel that much of the problems faced by people who are less well off tend to stem from each other. Poverty is the root of such problems, and factors like government corruption as observed in the case of Haiti just water such vicious situations. Until this is not axed at the root, such issues will continue to exist, and for the time being one can try to maintain the a stance of compassion and solidarity as a way of knowing what really is going on.