“The age of nations is past, it remains for us if we do not wish to perish, to urge a new global community, institutions to build the earth in this new context.” These words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin go along with Jim Yong Kim’s presentation as he, throughout his excellent lecture, articulated that we need to have mental models that are equal to the challenges of today’s world, to assess our ability to respond adequately to crisis. It was sad, Jim Kim said, “we waited for nine months before the World Bank and other stakeholders could do anything to respond to the Ebola crisis in some parts of West Africa.” The sense of urgency at the international community level is often wanting, especially when there are no direct economic interests involved. When the 1994 genocide in Rwanda happened, in broad daylight, the world abandoned Rwanda. Everyone knew what was happening and close to a million innocent people perished. Their lost lives continue to question us!
When will the world and its leaders be ready to intervene on time? Martin Luther King Jr. put it firmly, “People of ill-time have used time to make silence of good people.” Kim was unambiguously right that “it takes long to change people’s mental models.” More than changing our mental models, I want to add that we have to profoundly realize that poverty itself sadly makes a ‘preferential option’ for the poor and therefore as Jim Kim and Pope Francis hold, “making a preferential option for the poor questions [and confirms] fundamentally what our lives are all about.” This realization should go along with our collective conscience: “extreme poverty is a stain in our collective consciousness,” as Kim added. To Kim, World Bank leaders and Georgetown University, your contribution to changing mentalities and capacities is highly appreciated.
I worked at the
African Jesuit AIDS Network in Kenya—a Catholic charitable organization which coordinates several initiatives to alleviate the suffering caused by HIV and AIDS in Africa. I am indebted to Dr. Kim as he presented how, together with others, they strongly decided to transform HIV/AIDS from a death-sentence pandemic to a life-condition in which people’s lives could be prolonged at a time when “everybody said that it is impossible to treat HIV in Africa.” In Burundi, where I also worked for some time, I met some HIV positive women who frequently told me, “Fr. Marcel, if we had not met the Jesuit AIDS Center (
Service Yezu Mwiza), we would now be turning into our graves.” Some women got HIV through rape or war, but their lives had completely changed because of access to antiretroviral drugs. They are now living with great hopes to see their children go to school. I have experienced “the Lazarus effect” in working with people living with HIV and AIDS. To quote Dr. Kim, “investing in better health outcome has [indeed] such a big economic impact.”
Dr. Kim’s presentation, however, left me with a question which Catholic social thought should never cease to ask: Does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have any “meaningful weight” when it comes to the protection of and intervention for life and healthcare? In its article 3 and 25, we read respectively: “Everyone has the right to life […] Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of his family including food, clothing, housing and medical care.”[1] When we statistically count the people who still die from tuberculosis and malaria and the thousands of children who die under the age of five in poor countries, one is tempted to think that this right to health needs to be rethought! This is why in my last blog I insisted that health is a human right. There is a deadly cost of unequal access to medical care. Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health, could not have said it better: “access to the fruits of science and medicine should not be determined by passports, but rather by need … it is sad that in an age of explosive development in the realm of medical technology, it is unnerving to find that the discoveries of Salk, Sabin, and even Pasteur remain irrelevant to much of Humanity.”[2] I applauded Kim when he said: “We at the World Bank, we will never forget the poor who suffer from disease.” What Catholic social thought reminds the network of leaders is that poor people do not need charity or pity, they need opportunities. What the poor desire is a chance and this requires partnership and networking with all players to begin talking about development. The Catholic Church with its thousands of medical facilities, sometimes in remote places where no one else wants to go, ought to be a key stakeholder in healthcare at the global level.
We can now understand the words of Teilhard de Chardin which I used earlier: “… it remains for us if we do not wish to perish, to urge a new global community, institutions to build the earth in this new context.” For this to happen, we need the Jewish tzedakah, a Jewish word that combines charity and justice, referring to “social justice.” As Jonathan Sacks writes, it means that “no one should be without the basic requirements of existence, and that those who have more than they need must share some of that surplus with those who have less … so that everyone has a dignified life.”[3] Isn’t this Gospel hard to digest? Rwanda is a good example of how this is possible, and happily Jim Kim alluded to Rwanda in his speech. Despite Rwanda’s tragic past, it has rebuilt its healthcare system and almost every Rwandese now has medical insurance.
1. “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,"
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/.
2.
Paul Farmer, “Health, Healing, and Social Justice: Insights from Liberation Theology” in Michael Griffin and Jennie Weiss Block (eds.), In the Company of the Poor: Conversations with Dr. Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), 41.
3. Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (New York: Continuum, 2002), 114.
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