I feel it's part of my job to make the problems of the poor compelling.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the responsibility of addressing and highlighting the issues faced by the poor.
In this quote, Paul Farmer expresses his belief that it is not only important but also a duty to bring attention to the struggles of impoverished individuals. By making their problems compelling, he seeks to encourage others to engage with these issues and consider solutions that promote social justice and equity, thereby fostering a greater sense of responsibility within society.
In practice
In a speech about social responsibility at a charity event.
If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.
I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.
With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.
It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.
The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.
There is nothing wrong with underlining personal agency, but there is something unfair about using personal responsibility as a basis for assigning blame while simultaneously denying those who are being blamed the opportunity to exert agency in their lives
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
The early Church was married to poverty, prisons and persecutions. Today, the church is married to prosperity, personality, and popularity.
I'm trying to illuminate how perilously narrow we draw the concepts of masculinity and sexuality in our male culture - particularly in black male culture - and to help people to see that there's room enough for everyone.
It's a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That's where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.
What have I done? I've blundered my way through life. So I have my picture on the wall. The minute I die, that picture will start to yellow and fade and eventually be gone. Blown in the wind and become part of the molecular structure of something else. These things we see as "success," they're non-accomplishments.
The very spot where grew the bread that formed my bones, I see. How strange, old field, on thee to tread, and feel I'm part of thee.
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