“God gives everyone a gift and his gift is healing.”
Farmer was regarded as a saint in the community where he worked. The service he offered was crucial in the community where he lived because he made sure that the people survived the various diseases they contacted. The Haitian community was also deeply religious and while they were grateful for the help they were receiving, they could not let a man be idolized as a God. Because of this, they attributed his talent to the divinity they believed in and instead of claiming that Farmer reached the knowledge he had through hard work they praised God for giving him the intelligence necessary to be able to learn medicine and to be able to help them.
The world is full of miserable places. One way of living comfortably is not to think about them or, when you do, to send money.
The beginning of the novel introduces a place less than ideal, a disadvantaged country where pain and misery and the common elements linking everyone. For those coming from a country that does not deal with the same type of problems, the worries of the people living in the third-world countries are a mystery. Because of this and as a coping mechanism, those people tend to either completely ignore those countries or when they remember that they exist they lie to themselves that they are making a difference by either making donations or by offering to help to improve the lives of those living in those said countries.
One day in 1999, Farmer tried to use his credit card and was told he’d reached his limit.
While Farmer was well-off and had the possibility of living a wealthy life, he gave it all up to help others who needed money more than him. Farmer refused to use his money for his own selfish desires and chose instead to donate the money to make sure the hospital he was running remained open and was always ready to offer medical assistance to those in need. But sometimes his generosity was too extreme and he ended up having loans or discovering that he had no money left at all. Farmer however was not affected by his lack of money as he was ready to sacrifice everything just to make sure that he was helping as many people as possible.
