Health Care Reform

Let's begin our conversation on health care reform by reading the actual plan outlined by President Obama in his speech on Wednesday evening. Click here to access the White House website's text of the plan. If you scroll down on that page, you can receive the text of his remarks (or excerpts if you are in a hurry). The letter that Senator Kennedy sent to the President is also available on this page.

New Book by Tracy Kidder

Strength in What Remains is a new book by Tracy Kidder (author of Mountains Beyond Mountains). According to Tracy Kidder on Amazon.com: Strength in What Remains is the story of Deogratias, a young man from the central African nation of Burundi. In 1993, through no fault of his own, he was forced onto a terrifying journey, a journey that split his life in two. First he made a six-months-long escape, on foot, from ethnic violence in Burundi and from genocide in Rwanda. Then, in a strange twist of fate, he was, as it were, transported to New York City, where it sometimes seemed that his travails had only just begun.

I met Deo by chance 6 years ago. When I first heard his story, I had one simple thought: I would not have survived. I hoped in part to reproduce that feeling as I retold his story. I also hoped to humanize what, to most westerners anyway, is a mysterious, little-known part of the world. We hear about mass slaughter in distant countries and we imagine that murder and mayhem define those locales. Deo’s story opens up one of those places into a comprehensible landscape—and also opens up a part of New York that is designed to be invisible, the service entrances of the upper East Side, the camping sites that homeless people use in Central Park. But above all, I think, this is a book about coming to terms with memories. How can a person deal with memories like Deo’s, tormenting memories, memories with a distinctly ungovernable quality?

In the first part of Strength In What Remains, I recount Deo’s story. In the second part, I tell about going back with him to the stations of his life, in New York and Burundi. So the story that I tell isn’t only about the memories that Deo related to me. It’s also about seeing him overtaken by memories—again and again, and sometimes acutely. But Deo didn’t take me to Burundi just to show me around. Giving me a tour of his past was incidental to what he was up to in the present and the future. His story has a denoument that even now amazes me.

Deo is an American citizen. He doesn’t have to go back to Burundi. But he has returned continually and keeps on returning, and, amid the postwar wreckage, with the help of friends and family, he has created a clinic and public health system, free to those who can’t pay, in a rural village—part of a beginning, Deo dreams, of a new Burundi.

This facility was a pile of rocks when I visited the site in the summer of 2006. By the fall of 2008, it had become a medical center with several new buildings, a trained professional staff, and a fully stocked pharmacy. In its first year of operation it treated 21,000 different patients. (The organization that Deo founded and that sponsors and operates this facility is called Village Health Works.)

Deo was very young when he went through his long travail. Several strangers helped to save him from death and despair in Burundi and New York. So did sheer courage and pluck, and also Columbia University, which he attended as an undergraduate. But when it’s come to dealing with the burden of his memories, the public health system and clinic that he founded has been the nearest thing to a solution. In the end, it’s neither forgetting the past nor dwelling on the past that has worked for him. For him the answer has been remembering and acting. I once asked Deo why he had studied philosophy at Columbia. He told me, "I wanted to understand what had happened to me." In the end, he received what most students of philosophy receive—not answers, but more questions. As I was trying to describe his effort to build a clinic, I found myself writing: "Deo had discovered a way to quiet the questions he’d been asking at Columbia. That is, he saw there might be an answer for what troubled him most about the world, an answer that lay in his hands, indeed in his memory. You had to do something."—Tracy Kidder

Saving the World's Women

Don't miss today's NY Times Magazine, dedicated to "saving the world's women." You will find articles on the oppression of women worldwide, philanthropy among women, "the daughter deficit" in India and China, and much more. Click here to go to the online version of the magazine. Click here to see Nicholas Kristoff's audio slideshow, "A Powerful Truth," about how educating girls and empowering women can fight poverty and extremis.

EFJ Summer Reading List

The new selection on the Education for Justice (EFJ) summer reading list is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. What a title! The Catholic Social Teaching themes and connections in this novel include the sanctity of human life, hope in the midst of war, nonviolent resistance, and full humanity in community.

Book description from EFJ: In London, in 1946, author Juliet Ashton is looking for her next project after the war. Her letters to her publisher and her best friend describe her life, and her search for an idea. When she receives a charming letter from a resident of Guernsey, she's intrigued. This marvelous epistolary novel reveals the horrors of the occupation, but also the kindnesses during the war. The shadow of Elizabeth McKenna hangs over the book, the wise young woman who is missing from the island, and whose story haunts the residents and Juliet. Readers will care deeply about the islanders and their stories, just as Juliet does.

Caritas in Veritate

A 12-page Resource Guide on Caritas in Veritate, written by Jim Hug, SJ and provided by Education for Justice, is available on the Social Justice page of the SCC East web site, available by clicking here and scrolling to the bottom of the page.

EFJ Summer Reading List

In its continuing quest to provide suggestions for summer reading that contains Catholic Social Teaching (CST) themes, Education for Justice (EFJ) suggests The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. The sanctity of human life and nonviolent resistance play a role in this work of literary fiction.

Book Description by EFJ: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is a novel of cruelty, poverty, and hope. Liesel Meminger is a young girl who has been placed in foster care by her mother. Liesel's brother dies en route to their new home and this leaves Liesel traumatized, causing her to have terrible nightmares in the middle of the night. Liesel's foster father begins teaching her to read on these nights to distract her from her pain. Liesel learns to turn to books for comfort. When the war begins, comfort becomes a rare state of mind, so Liesel finds ways to seek it out. Liesel begins to steal books in her efforts to deal with the cruelty of the world around her. The Book Thief is a complicated story of survival that will encourage its readers to think.

EFJ Summer Reading List

The third recommendation from Education for Justice (EFJ) is one that is quite familiar to our blog readers, but one that bears mentioning again and again -- Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea. The themes of solidarity and commitment, peace-building, the rights of the girl, and education are prominent in this work of non-fiction.

Book description from EFJ: The war-torn mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan appear in the news as the breeding grounds of terrorist training camps, Al Qaeda hide-outs, and fierce religious extremism. In Three Cups of Tea, Mortenson and Relin take readers behind the headlines to reveal the true heart and soul of this explosive region and to show how one man's promise might be enough to change the world.