Winter is a philosophical, thought provoking season for me.
Like the snow we used to get, my thoughts are deep. Especially since COVID began, I’ve pondered my role, my contribution during my 80 years.
In winter, I also read much more than during the gardening and hiking and “see the kids” seasons. There is a theme that runs through my book selections: Those who are just ordinary people making their way when, all of a sudden, a crossroads appears and they make a choice that forever changes their life and the lives of others.
On Martin Luther King Day, I read Heather Cox Richardson’s daily article, and I quote: “… I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.”
Four specific books and movies based on fact haunt me because of this topic — heroism by everyday people: “Hotel Rwanda”, “Schindler’s List”, “There is No Me Without You”, and “Mountains Beyond Mountains”.
In spring of 1994, Rwanda was consumed in civil war between the Hutu and Tutsi.
Paul Rusesabagina is a hotel manager. That’s it, folks!! He has a wife and kids and he is just doing his job when everything changes. His country, as he knew it, is destroying itself. It is a race war. The hotel is owned by Europeans, not present in Rwanda. The hotel caters to guests who are wealthy. While UN troops try to protect them, it is obvious that those troops will not be present for long. Paul and his staff and family hide many local people, both Hutu and Tutsi. They sell things to bribe and to buy food for the hidden.
As the UN troops prepare to withdraw, they again urge Paul and his family to flee. At the last moment, Paul brings out the many people whom he has hidden in fear. Together they board the buses and, as they depart in route to safety in UN camps, we see the vast carnage along the road. Paul saved at least 1,200 Tutsi and Hutu refugees. The genocide ended in July of 1994 when the Tutsi killed remaining Hutu or drove them into Congo. A half-million Rwandans were killed.
No one would have blamed Paul had he left the hotel and fled the country early in the conflict. He knew he would have asylum with the owners of the hotel he had served for many years. He had family there that he wanted to find and save (he did find his two nieces but not their parents). But that does not explain the risking of his own life or that of his wife and children. It doesn’t explain his protecting hundreds of strangers!
In the movie one sees that he was, in earlier, safer days, a mover and shaker. He buys black market goods for his guests. He pays people off for booze and other things his guests expect. What pushes him into heroism?
Next is “Schindler’s List”. Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist who owned a factory during World War II. He was a member of the Nazi Party from Czechoslovakia who locates himself in Krakow, planning to make big money. He has a Jewish accountant who helps Schindler arrange financing and get supplies via black market, and at the same time, gets many Jewish workers to be “essential” thus being saved from concentration camps. Schindler gradually finds humanity. During the last months of the war, he spent what money he had to bribe Nazi officials not to kill the Jewish workers.
Schindler and his accountant had kept a list of Jews saved. There were more than 850.
This is but a small part of the larger poignant story, but my question has always been, at what exact point and why did Schindler decide not to take his money and flee?
Rather, he risked his life by saving so many others. Perhaps the influence of his Jewish accountant? Perhaps because he could no long be complicit to “man’s inhumanity to man.” I don’t know. But somehow he found compassion. He found strength.
In “Mountains Beyond Mountains”, author Tracy Kidder describes the goal undertaken by Dr. Paul Farmer, Harvard University School of Medicine, to attack tuberculosis in Haiti. In doing so, he built a health care system, staffed by Haitians and focused on communicable diseases that were taking the lives of a large percentage of local people. The system delivered health care to people in their homes and villages. He then, with many others, supported this same system to be built in many other countries in need. He arranged for local people to be trained to deliver public health services, thus raising the standard of living while putting people to work as well as lowering the suffering of millions.
Dr. Farmer was, of course, a public health specialist. That’s what he studied to do. But he spent most of his adult life going from one poor country to another, finding partners and empowering those living in the poor countries to save lives. He didn’t have to do that. I do not know the moment in which he decided to dedicate his life to this inspiring work, but I know that he could have made a bloody fortune as a doctor in Boston or any other big hospital system. He could have worked for people who had money. He would not have had to beg for funding. I choose to believe that he continued his quest to save lives — to rid the world of TB and HIV and the other many plagues through education and by supporting those whose neighbors and country people were at risk of death.
He didn’t have to do it. But at some point he dedicated his life to it. And I believe that he and those who helped him are heroes. (For more information see Partners in Health PIH.org)
“There is No Me Without You” begins with a then 23-year-old Ethiopian woman who has just lost her husband and her adult daughter. She is not poor. She is middle class. Her name is Haregewoin Teferra.
The AIDS pandemic is rampant in Africa. Bereft, she becomes a recluse living in self-imposed exile that is suddenly interrupted when a priest brings first one and then another orphaned child into her care. Then two more and two more. The book tells of the hundreds of children cared for by this woman and those she hired to help her. How she runs an unofficial orphanage and adoption service. And while at it, she informs the world of the pain and suffering and unmet needs. Her community is hostile to her as AIDS is, of course, scary. But she perseveres.
So, as is often the case with many of my columns, I finally reach the clincher — the POINT, for God’s sake! My pondering is this: Would I do the right thing in these situations? Would I have the courage? The selflessness? The compassion to act? To not walk away?
And how about you?