frailty and boldness

I just started reading Mountains Beyond Mountains last night after picking it up from the Bundibugyo Library - Chez Myhre Branch. "GASP!" I can just hear the collective gasps now going on around the world as you all read..."Heidi's never read Mountains Beyond Mountains?! Travesty!" And you would be right, it's been a long time comin'. In any case, I am reading it now, so you can all get back on your chairs and rest assured that I have not in fact lost all connection to the rest of the world, I'm just several years behind, not much is new there!

Anyways, only 2 chapters in but I'm already enjoying it. Humor me while I share a bit of what makes me tick...I've recently told you about my fondness of the city, here's another snapshot into my affinities...this is a bit from the above mentioned book that so articulately describes some of of what I love about health care. PS (pre-script) - Now, all of you out there who I have disagreed with about medicine and it's importance or lack thereof, other medical topics of various kinds, bear with me, give me some grace and the benefit of the doubt for this once and just read :)

"Outside the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, you're aware of a relative urban quiet. A Wall Street of medicine surrounds you: the campus of Harvard Medical School and the Countway Medical Library, Children's Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Brigham. The buildings look imposing packed together, and even awesome when you let yourself imagine what's going on inside. Chest crackings, organ transplants, molecular imagings, genetic probes - gloved hands and machines routinely reaching into bodies and making diagnoses and corrections, so much of human frailty on the one hand and boldness on the other. One feels stilled in the presence of this enterprise. Even the Boston drivers, famously deranged, don't honk much when passing through the neighborhood." - Tracey Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains)

"so much frailty on the one hand and boldness on the other"...whether you're at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston or Nyahuka Health Center IV in Bundibugyo, Uganda, some things are the same the world round...unfortunately the "famously deranged" drivers of Nyahuka don't have the same sort of reverence for NHC IV as they do in Boston for those imposing institutions...(you'd be hard pressed to describe NHC IV as imposing!). Whether Boston or Nyahuka, you have to pause every now and again to marvel at what it is that's going on around and through you...successes and failures...frailty and boldness are in it all.