Tracy Kidder and His Art of Storytelling

Tracy Kidder is a name I only heard once while watching my friend read Mountains Beyond Mountains for her Introduction to Global Health class. My friend lauded on  the descriptions of Paul Farmer's life provided by Kidder in the novel and the accomplishments, goals, and efforts he made to solve health problems on an entirely global scale. Through Kidder's presentation, I learned about his relationship with Paul Farmer, the founder of the Partners in Health organization, and Deo, a young medical student from Burundi. As a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, Kidder enjoys simply the pleasure of storytelling, especially about Farmer's mission to build a clinic in an impoverished part of Haiti and Deo's passsionate goal in creating a system of public health in his rural village in central Africa. For Deo, he was working as a hospital intern when Burundi erupted in an ethnic civil war. Surviving the onset of the war, he escaped to Rwanda then New York City, delivering groceries and finally enrolling at Columbia University to progress in his dream of improving public health in his native land. Strength in What Remains is not only a story about survival of a individual in midst of an ethnic war, but also a tale about survival, despair, determination, evil, and kindness. While telling the story of Deo, Kidder remarked how one person can affect the global process of problems with diseases. He added that the best stories of living monuments are "memories that have to be preserved," for his way of upholding Deo's life was to tell and spread his remarkable story worldwide. In doing so, he says that there is no need for justification. In addition, Kidder stated that he accidentally started the book in Haiti, intentionally uninterested in the issues that outlined the lives of individuals in the country. Instead, what he aspired to do was art. He mentions that "art has the great power to transform the sufferings into something beautiful."

I think he achieves both storytelling and the art of touching the lives of others around the world. By conveying the story of Deo, he inspires individuals to recognize the global problems and what people are currently doing to save others from ongoing affliction. In fact, I believe that the stories he tells have the potential to encourage readers to experience the character's lives from writing on the page "into the minds of the reader's imagination." I believe that through his presentation, Kidder hoped to build comprehension of global issues through embodiment of inspirational human experiences. Interestingly, Kidder questioned the audience about their ways of approaching hardships that Deo experienced. This question lingered in the atmosphere of the auditorium. I realized that through similar questions embedded in his stories, Kidder has improved the mindsets of individuals to help the world and stop neglecting the virtuous accomplishments people are currently making. In our AMST class, we learned that racially-motivated riots occurred due to society's neglect towards social tension, which certainly relates to the obliviousness of society with not just racial problems, but also health issues in the world today. For our Writing 140 class, I learned that I should not just formulate a group of words into sentences, but stir the imaginations of the readers, inspire, and attempt to create life and a greater understanding of the world on paper.