I met a doctor a few weeks ago from the US.  She was here in Guatemala doing some volunteer work at a hospital near Lake Atitlan, and she’d been in Guatemala for about a year.  Unfortunately she was leaving when I met her so this is not a story of romance.  She did, however, need a ride to the airport, and since a friend of mine was lending me his car for the summer, I thought it only right to continue this chain of positive karma and give her a ride.  This doctor, Kate is her name actually, gave me a book she had just finished called, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.  

Kate explained briefly that the book was non-fiction, and about a doctor who goes to different countries throughout the world to practice medicine on people who cannot afford decent healthcare.  I was obviously grateful for the gift, but my first reaction was that I would probably set the book down on a shelf and never open it.  But then, by chance, I did open it, and I even started reading it. 

The book is over 300 pages long but I read it in only a few days.  I read it while lying in bed, waiting for a couple planes back to Iowa, and even while on a boat in the Missouri river while my brother was wake-boarding.  Why?  Because it’s damn good.  It’s inspirational.  It’s eye-opening.  And although I am extremely content being a teacher, it even made me want to become a doctor a little.  

But this is not an advertising campaign for Mountains Beyond Mountains, which you can buy for a little more than $10.00 at Overstock.com with $2.95 shipping.  No, I wouldn’t do that.  :)  What’s motivated me to write is the title of the book.  

Now, I have no idea what Tracy Kidder intended by the title, but here’s my interpretation, and why I like it so much.  He could’ve titled it, Valleys Beyond Mountains, or Paradise Beyond Mountains, or Glory Beyond Mountains.  But he didn’t.  I’m glad.  

For me, the idea is simple.  We often believe that once we clear a hurdle, or overcome a challenge, things will get so much easier.  We’re told this all our lives.  Just get through high school, gain your independence and college will be so much better.  Graduate college and get the job of your dreams!  Find the person you love and get married!  We assume that all these things will be the icing on the cake and make our lives so much easier.  The reality though, in each one of these cases is that even when we climb this mountain, or achieve something great, there will be more mountains, more challenges, and more struggles.  That’s life.  And although a pessimist or a nihilist might be a bit forlorn about this outlook, I love it.  

I know that when I get married one day it’s not going to be all rainbows and butterflies as the song says.  My wife and I will fight, we’ll disagree, we’ll embarrass each other, and we’ll have to overcome obstacles.  Each year when I teach, I will upset students, make mistakes, and feel like there is never enough time to accomplish everything I want.  But in the process of climbing these mountains, regardless of the fact that there will undoubtedly be mountains afterwards, we mature in so many ways.

This, I believe, is the idea of the book.  Paul Farmer, the doctor in the story, goes from Haiti to Chile to Russia saving people’s lives by treating tuberculosis.  He literally saves hundreds of thousands of lives.  And all the while he’s doing this, he begins to realize how many more need saving.  At one point he walks more than eight hours to a remote Haitian village to treat a man with TB.  When he gets there he realize the rest of the family members are suffering from the disease as well.  He climbs an enormous “mountain” only to discover that there are even more “mountains” in the process.  Yet he never gives up.  He continues to climb.  

We must continue to climb.

 

This is a picture I took in Lake Atitlan.  Those are two volcanoes, not mountains, 
but they represent the book very, very well.