One Year Later: Jim Ansara Remembers Dr. Paul Farmer
The past few weeks have been an emotional rollercoaster as I reflected, with some trepidation, on the first anniversary of the passing of Dr. Paul Farmer. He was instrumental in changing the trajectory of my personal and professional life, ultimately leading me to a second and incredibly fulfilling, challenging, and meaningful career in global health. Even now, I intensely feel the loss and also great appreciation for how Paul compelled me and hundreds of colleagues to carry on his work and vision.
It was Paul who continually challenged my “certainty” about what was possible and achievable in the world. Paul accepted very few conventional limits and norms, especially when it came to global equity and justice. He pushed me relentlessly to build more, build faster, and build smarter healthcare facilities that would bring dignity and hope to people in the most inhospitable, insecure, and inaccessible places on the planet. Regardless of those who said, “it will cost too much, it can’t be sustained, it simply can’t be done,” Paul insisted we should “do anything it takes” to prevent unnecessary deaths and needless suffering.
My thoughts about Paul intensified when I read about President Jimmy Carter entering hospice care around the same time of Paul’s passing. I have greatly admired President Carter since the early 1990s when I first became involved in Habitat for Humanity, a housing organization he brought to international prominence after his presidency. President Carter’s beliefs in racial and social equity inspired me to make a difference with my life after I retired from Shawmut Design and Construction, the company I had founded. President Carter’s courage, humility, and accessibility to all kinds of people were character qualities I admired, while regularly falling short of achieving them myself. In his own way, Jimmy Carter spent much of his life as an advocate for global health justice. Despite receiving criticism along the way, he garnered the world’s attention to fight horrific neglected tropical diseases like guinea worm and river blindness.
Reflecting upon the legacies of both President Carter and Dr. Farmer, I became truly sad, maybe even despondent. I thought what Paul would have achieved and influenced — the change he would have driven — had he lived another ten or twenty years. Paul would have pushed so many of us to do more than we believed possible. He would have recruited countless others to his unyielding war on social injustice and global health inequity.
Paul was an incredibly effective teacher. However, he was not always easy to work with. His close colleague, Dr. Louise Ivers, an infectious disease specialist, executive director at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Global Health, and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, framed it very well in recent interview with WBUR’s Cognoscenti program:
“Paul, like all humans, was a complicated person, and he was relentless in his desire to achieve the mission of equity and justice. And sometimes that made it hard. It made it hard because it could feel impossible to be like Paul. It could feel impossible to fulfill the mission that he wanted to fulfill. And I think it’s important to realize that he was human and he had human failings like we all do. It’s important to know that, because to do the work — to advance the work — you can’t wait for somebody who you think is just this really aspirational, saintly being to do the work on your behalf. You have to do the work. And the work is hard.”
On February 21, the one-year anniversary of his death, I attended a small but very special Memorial Mass for Paul Farmer that was held at the Chapel at Boston College. There, I was surrounded by clinicians, academics, activists, and friends of Paul, all of whom had been driven and inspired by him to do more. Being with others whose lives had been transformed by Paul was very comforting to me in a surprising way. While we all acutely felt the loss of our friend and mentor, we were equally determined to carry forth his global work and vision.
I will always wonder what could have been had he lived a much longer life, but I feel a level of joy and gratitude in realizing that so many of those he recruited to the “war on global health inequity” are not only carrying on the fight, but doing so with renewed vigor and determination. I find solace in knowing that future generations will nevertheless be influenced by his writings, his teaching, and most of all by the results he achieved.
We will miss not just his ideas, and his “unreasonable” expectations, but his voice, his mischievous smile, and his seemingly indefatigable spirit. There are many other incredibly influential and visionary leaders in global health, but for me. There will never be another Paul Farmer, who could simultaneously push my buttons and push me to do more, all the while making me feel very special to accompany him on a journey of a lifetime.
Jim Ansara is the co-founder and managing director of Build Health International, a design-and-build organization dedicated to improving health equity. After founding and retiring from Shawmut Design and Construction, Jim established BHI to support the building of sustainable healthcare infrastructure in Haiti. Under his leadership, BHI has completed over 200 architectural, engineering, and building projects throughout Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
Learn more about Build Health International.
