On Topic: Do Gooders

It is a small planet. If you need any convincing, there is this:

Muscatine-reared Jim Yong Kim, the Dartmouth College president and next head of the World Bank, was one of the founders of Partners in Health.

Kim also was endorsed by Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda. That's no doubt in part because Partners in Health - the quarter-century-old organization dedicated to international health and social justice - established one of its hospitals and has done a great deal of good work in that country.

The other prime mover behind Partners in Health has been physician Paul Farmer. Farmer's story, and that of Partners, is told a 2003 book titled “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” by Tracy Kidder.

It was while researching that book, Kidder, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a book about computer engineers, of all things, came to meet a Burundi refuge named Deogratias Niyizonkiza.

“Deogratias,” in case your Latin is as rusty as mine, means “thanks be to God” - a prophetic name if ever there was one, as we learn from Kidder's 2009 book about Deo, “Strength in What Remains.”

And it's here the small-planet connections come full circle: “Strength in What Remains” is this year's All Iowa Reads selection. The book has been read and discussed by community groups throughout the state, and Kidder dropped by Des Moines in March to discuss his writing, Partners in Health and Deo's experiences.

“Strength in What Remains” could have been subtitled “One Good Deed Leads to Many More.” Deo's astonishing tale indeed is a case of people throughout his journey helping him - people he did not know and who had no reason for doing so.

But they did.

Deo was a 24-year-old third-year medical student in 1994, when he fled Burundi - where horrific civil war was carried out there and in Rwanda by conscienceless thugs who slaughtered women and children with machetes - for America. He had $200 in his pocket and spoke no English.

The father of a school friend had paid for his airfare.

When he landed in Ireland and thought he'd already arrived in New York, a Russian woman who also spoke French, as Deo did, helped translate, though they'd never met before. (The green fields and cows Deo saw out the window hadn't tipped him off - he surely had been traumatized by what he'd been through in Burundi, and had no idea what to expect in the strange New World.)

She sat next to him on their flight to New York to comfort him - it was his first airplane trip.

In America, a Senegal-born customs agent offered to take Deo to his own Harlem apartment until he got settled.

Later, when Deo was making $15 a day delivering groceries and sleeping in Central Park (its trees reminded him of the forests of his childhood), a nun who worked with Manhattan's homeless found an older couple to take him in. They in turn - remarkably - paid for Deo to enroll at Columbia University.

It was in the stacks, as librarians call them, of one of Columbia's libraries that Deo came across a book called “Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues.” The book detailed how tuberculosis, AIDS and other diseases victimized the poor of the Third World and what richer nations could do about it.

To say Deo, as a citizen of such impoverished lands and as a man of medicine, identified with and understood precisely those challenges would be an understatement.

The author of that book was Paul Farmer.

The two met a year and half later in Boston, and they discovered their mutual belief that poverty and lack of education were the key culprits for much of the trouble in places such as Burundi and Rwanda.

A job was created for Deo at Partners in Health. “We knew he was plenty smart,” Farmer later told Kidder.

From that came the opportunity for Deo to return to Burundi, his home, to construct a medical clinic, then help establish what is essentially a national public health system, Village Health Works.

That health system healed more than cuts and coughs by treating all who came - no matter which side of the civil war they'd found themselves.

Deo and Farmer's adventures, together and separately, are, to say the least, inspiring, and Kidder's “Strength in What Remains” is powerful stuff. Today Deo is working in Israel to complete his medical degree.

And if you'd like one more link to this circle, remember that the World Bank's purpose is to raise money to provide low-interest loans to developing nations to fight poverty and its aftershocks - hunger, disease, brutality and deprivation ….

One good deed leads to many more.