Paul Farmer

Made for the Ivy League

Paul Farmer was one of those people who make the rest of us feel like slackers.

As a teen, he earned a full ride scholarship to Duke University, where he studied medical anthropology and Latin, spent time volunteering with migrant farmworkers, and basically never slept. Then he headed to Harvard Medical School (because why not) and while training to become a physician, he simultaneously completed a PhD in medical anthropology. That’s right: he earned two of the most demanding degrees Harvard offers at the same time. Because apparently one wasn’t challenging enough.

He published research before he graduated. He taught. He wrote. He dazzled. His mentors sang his praises. His classmates admired him, or at least tried to draft off his brilliance. With his credentials, Paul could have landed any job he wanted. He could have had the kind of life that comes with a corner office, a house in Cambridge, and wine-and-cheese conferences in Switzerland.

But instead, he moved to a village in rural Haiti where clean water was scarce, roads were more pothole than pavement, and lived in a cinderblock house with no running water. He learned Creole and walked miles to visit patients in mountain villages.

Why would Farmer choose to live like that?

FROM WIKIMEDIA – Dr. Paul Farmer visiting a mother and her child. 

He Saw Something Wrong and Refused to Look Away

Paul Farmer didn’t move to Haiti because it was part of some résumé strategy. He didn’t go because it was a stepping stone to something bigger. He went because his faith wouldn’t let him look away.

While still a college student, he spent time in rural Haiti and saw suffering that shouldn’t have existed. Children dying of treatable infections. Entire communities without access to basic medical care. Diseases that had been cured elsewhere still claiming lives, simply because no one had bothered to build a clinic nearby.

For many, these injustices might’ve prompted momentary outrage or a well-meaning donation. But for Farmer, it was personal. It collided head-on with everything he believed about God, justice, and what it means to be human.

Through liberation theology – a movement that reads the Bible through the eyes of the poor – Farmer found language for what he already felt deep in his bones: that faith without action is dead. That God’s heart beats hardest for those on the margins. And that following Jesus means following him into the places others ignore.

He once said, “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.” That belief drove him not into a pulpit, but into mountain villages, overcrowded clinics, and late-night house calls. He didn’t need permission. He didn’t wait for the system to change. He just went where the pain was greatest and got to work.

FROM MEDIUM – Paul Farmer with one of his very first patients. 

Partners In Health

And so, in 1987, Paul Farmer co-founded Partners In Health.

At first it as just a shoestring operation. They didn’t have much: no big grants, no institutional backing, no blueprint. Waht they did have though was the conviction that healthcare is a human right. Not a luxury. Not a reward for wealth. A basic, non-negotiable right for every person, everywhere.

They started with a small clinic in Cange, a poor and isolated village in the Central Plateau of Haiti. There were no paved roads, no electricity, and no access to even the most basic medical care. But that didn’t stop them. They made do with what they had, turning borrowed spaces and borrowed supplies into a lifeline for the people around them.

Farmer treated each patient as if they were his own family, often for free, and always with dignity. He and his team didn’t just drop medicine from the sky and disappear. They hired and trained local health workers, walked miles to make house calls, and partnered with communities to identify root causes of illness – malnutrition, contaminated water, crumbling infrastructure – and addressed those too.

And somehow, in between all that, he kept his role at Harvard. He would spend days or weeks in Haiti tending to patients and building systems, then fly back to Boston to teach classes, deliver lectures, and fight for policy change at the highest levels. He lived in both worlds and demanded they talk to each other.

Over time, that little clinic grew into a global movement.

Today, Partners In Health operates in over a dozen countries, delivering high-quality care to millions, and pushing the entire field of global health to do better, to reach further, to serve more justly.

FROM MEDIUM – Dr. Cyprien Shyirambere checks on cancer patient at a Partners in Health facility in Rwanda.

The Parable of Talents Embodied

In Matthew 25, Jesus tells the story of a master who entrusts his wealth to three servants before leaving on a long journey. Two of them take what they’ve been given and invest it. Not recklessly or selfishly, but in a way that aligns with their master’s values. They understand what he would want. They know what kind of return he hopes for. And when he returns, they have something to show for it: evidence not just of action but of their commitment to their master’s greatest hopes, dreams, and desires.

But the third servant? He plays it safe and buries the treasure he’s been given. When the master returns, he has nothing to show for it. Not because he wasn’t capable. Not because he didn’t know what his master would have had him do. But because he refused to take part in his master’s mission.

Paul Farmer was of the same ilk as the first two servants. He was one of those rare souls who refused to bury what he’d been given. He took everything he had – his brilliance, his compassion, his education, his connections, his stubbornness, his inhuman capacity for red-eye flights to and from Haiti – and he invested it. Not for profit. Not for applause. But in people and places the world had written off. In those he believed God cared most about.

He could have chosen a safer road. A quieter life. But instead, he chose to be faithful to his master’s mission. He chose to show up, again and again, to some of the hardest places on earth and pour himself out in service of others.

That’s what it looks like when you don’t bury the treasure God has given you, but multiply what you’ve been entrusted with.