Reply #6: I am just finishing my read of Tracy Kidder's book on Paul Farmer

[truedelphi]

And the section where Farmer travels from Haiti, where he struggles to do the most mundane procedures with lack of money and equipment, to Cuba, where there are twice as many dcotors per capita as in the USA is amazing.

He was just thrilled to be there. Although the US boycott of Cuba had indeed hurt the island, the fact that Cuba could not produce any fertilizer or pesticides means that almost all the food is organic, and many of the diseses we see here due to pesticide poisoning occur there much less frequently.

Where haiti is a nation where people literally eat dirt, and where 200,000 kids live in the streets of the capital due to loss of parents from AIDS, Cuba everyone at least had a roof over their heads.

And even the view from the airplane approach was astonishing to Farmer. Whereas Haiti and Cuba are in the same area of the world, Haiti lacked the agricultural lushness of Cuba.