Dartblog

We’ve all heard ad infinitum John Sloan Dickey’s memorable phrase from his Convocation address in 1946: “The world’s troubles are your troubles … and there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix.” President Kim repeats it very frequently, and he invoked it when the College rushed aid to Haiti after that country’s earthquake.

But how should the College approach problems in other nations? As these pictures illustrate, current flooding in Pakistan is disastrous (800,000 Pakistanis Cut Off From Road) and approximately six million people there need emergency shelter. Is Pakistan’s problem our problem, too? The need for medical care and funds must be as great in the Punjab as it was in Haiti, don’t you think?

In fact, Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said: “This disaster is worse than the tsunami, the 2005 Pakistan earthquake and the Haiti earthquake.” The Daily Telegraph noted that, “Billions of pounds will be needed to rebuild affected areas but western nations have pledged only tens of millions in aid.”

President Kim certainly could make setting priorities the topic of a Presidential Lecture. It is a theme with which the Partners in Health organization has more than a little experience on an individual level, as well as on a larger scale. For example, in his book Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, Tracy Kidder described on pp. 262-278* how a PIH team airlifted a very late stage Haitian cancer patient, John, in a chartered private jet to Boston for state-of-the-art treatment. However, left unexamined was data on how many lives could have been saved had the resources allocated to this one young man been devoted to many other suffering people.

*President Kim is mentioned on 44 individual pages in Kidder’s 301-page book. The first time is on page 100.