I feel it's part of my job to make the problems of the poor compelling.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the responsibility of addressing and highlighting the issues faced by the poor.
In this quote, Paul Farmer expresses his belief that it is not only important but also a duty to bring attention to the struggles of impoverished individuals. By making their problems compelling, he seeks to encourage others to engage with these issues and consider solutions that promote social justice and equity, thereby fostering a greater sense of responsibility within society.
In practice
In a speech about social responsibility at a charity event.
If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.
I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.
With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.
It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.
The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.
There is nothing wrong with underlining personal agency, but there is something unfair about using personal responsibility as a basis for assigning blame while simultaneously denying those who are being blamed the opportunity to exert agency in their lives
When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements.
The strong are strengthened by reverses; the trouble is that the true meaning of events scores next to nothing in the match we play with men. Appearances decide our gains or losses and the points are trumpery. And a mere semblance of defeat may hopelessly checkmate us.
Since I have introduced this term I had always a bad conscience. . . . I cannot help to feel it strongly and I am unable to believe that such an ugly thing should be realized in nature.
Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits.
Lukewarm people call 'radical' what Jesus expected of all His followers.
Every area of trouble gives out a ray of hope; and the one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.
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