The Least We Can Do
Ethan Casey with Greg Mortenson and Fawad Butt, Downers Grove, Illinois, April 5, 2008.
I grew up about two hours’ drive from here, in an all-white small town in Wisconsin. It was an unremarkable, old-fashioned American place – when I tell childhood stories, friends say it sounds like Lake Wobegon. I could easily have stayed there, as most of my school friends did.
But I didn’t. Instead, I seized a fortuitous opportunity to visit Haiti as a teenager, then whimsically spent a college year in Nepal. Then I just kept following that road, and eventually it led me to Pakistan. The spur for me was the same as for one of my heroes, the British foreign correspondent and travel writer Gavin Young, who wrote that reading the novels of one of his heroes, Joseph Conrad, had taught him that there was “really no question of choice when a romantically inclined young man is faced with adventure and life on one hand and a battened-down existence on the other.”
But I learned that the direct personal experience of the world that I craved was not only an adventure, but also an unsparing test of character. Not only a gift, that is, but also a burden. You can’t experience the world as it really is without learning, if you’re honest, that how it is is intolerably unjust. My father’s example and guidance taught me always to remain open to experience and change and education and difference. But I am not only his son but also the grandson of his mother, a farmer’s daughter from East Texas whose outlook on the world was uncompromisingly moralistic – in the best possible sense. One of the things I most vividly remember her saying is, “You know darn well that’s just plain wrong, Ethan Casey. And I’m agin it.”
On my most recent visits to Haiti, in 2004, I had the honor of getting to know Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard Medical School professor who runs a celebrated free hospital in one of the poorest areas of Haiti. Farmer’s story is told very well in Tracy Kidder’s recent bestseller Mountains Beyond Mountains, and there are many parallels between Farmer’s story and Greg Mortenson’s.
One quiet evening four years ago in rural Haiti, I found myself discussing the world and the way it works with Farmer and his friend Ti Jean Gabriel. Ti Jean was a prickly, intelligent Haitian peasant whose highly developed sense of how the world works had been confirmed by several visits he had made to the US with Farmer. “In the US,” Ti Jean told me, “I’ve never seen a Haitian go into a store or a restaurant with visible firearms. But in Haiti, Americans go into stores openly armed all the time. When I see you writing, it doesn’t make me hate you. When I see Paul with a stethoscope, it doesn’t make me feel bad. But when I see an American soldier in Haiti, it makes me want to kill myself.”
I had told Farmer about my travels in Pakistan. “This must be a lot like what you got in the Islamic world,” he remarked. “These are the people I work with, and this is how they talk to me.” The world, Farmer told me, “is clearly very screwed up. And it can be cruel, and you and I are the beneficiaries of this system. I get no more confident, as time goes by, that I can figure it out.”
I suggested that, regardless, it’s preferable to be wounded by experience of the world than to be sheltered from it.
“Yes, of course,” replied Farmer. “Because to be wounded is to acknowledge the truth, whereas to be sheltered is to be oblivious. But it’s permanent, and it’s incurable.”
I mentioned the Nobel Prize-winning writer V.S. Naipaul, who had been an early role model of mine because he put a premium on experience and observation – on acquiring and articulating an understanding of the world – but who had eventually been swallowed whole by his own ego.
“You just can’t be that way if you’re living in a place like this,” said Farmer. “Because every day you wake up, you go to the clinic, you do your work, and you see evidence of your failure. Last night at about 11 o’clock a woman and her 13-year-old daughter showed up at our house, just saying, ‘I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten in two days.’ If you’ve been working on poverty and hunger issues for twenty-something years, and you’re not making progress on some fronts, I think it does keep you humble. Knowing that the world is so dented and damaged must be humiliating, if not humbling – one or the other. If you cocoon yourself away from misery, then you can be delusional about how great and praiseworthy you are. But living in a place like this – look at this road. Look at the way these people are transported on these vehicles.”
I’ve always felt a strong, even urgent vocation as a writer, but I’ve struggled with how intangible and seemingly ineffectual my work is. Why write, if it makes no difference in the world, especially given how solitary and isolating it can be?
Farmer and I talked about this. “Writers unfortunately often do have to cocoon themselves just to do their work,” he granted. “They can’t be out there having people pulling at their sleeves and saying they’re hungry. They have to write.”
“But first they have to go out into the world,” I said. “The writers I admire the most are the ones who don’t just sit in their cocoons and write, but go out into the world.”
That is what I made a point of doing, from an early age. I don’t claim to be especially praiseworthy for having done that. In fact, like Paul Farmer, I get no more confident as time goes by. One thing I do know, though, having been to Haiti and Burma and Zimbabwe and Nepal and Cambodia and Pakistan, is that there is no justification for being complacent or bored or parochial. And, having figured out at least that the world is intolerably unjust, there is a lot of work to be done. The kind of work I am best equipped to do is writing, and I hope that someone somewhere out there finds it useful.
Others do work that’s more obviously important. One thing we all know darn well is that it’s just plain wrong for children in Baltistan or anywhere else to be without schools. Greg Mortenson allowed his experience of Baltistan, filtered through the personal character his parents had instilled in him in Tanzania and Minnesota, and refracted by human sympathy, gratitude, and friendship, to influence the choices he made about how and where to deploy his talents and effort during his time in this world. The choices he made have directly and demonstrably made the world a better place. What the rest of us are doing here tonight in support of his work is the least we can do.
