A friendship that moves mountains

<p>By John Krull TheStatehouseFile.com  INDIANAPOLIS – Paul Farmer and Todd McCormack don’t need much encouragement to start teasing each other. They have been doing it for decades. They started long before Farmer was a world-famous infectious disease doctor, Harvard University professor and subject of an award-winning book, Tracy Kidder’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains.” And long before […]</p><p>The post <a href="//thestatehousefile.com/commentary-friendship-moves-mountains/38021/&quot;" rel="&quot;nofollow&quot;">Commentary: A friendship that moves mountains</a> appeared first on <a href="//thestatehousefile.com&quot;" rel="&quot;nofollow&quot;">TheStatehouseFile.com</a>.</p><p><div class="&quot;pf-content&quot;"></p><p>INDIANAPOLIS – Paul Farmer and Todd McCormack don’t need much encouragement to start teasing each other.</p><p>They have been doing it for decades.</p><p>They started long before Farmer was a world-famous infectious disease doctor, Harvard University professor and subject of an award-winning book, Tracy Kidder’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains.” And long before McCormack was one of the driving forces behind sports programming powerhouse IMG.</p><p>It began even before they became co-founders of Partners in Health, a $170 million-a-year organization that brings medical care to some of the poorest and most endangered places on earth.</p><p>No, their pattern of joshing each other began 40 years ago, when they were freshmen at Duke University. They met when they moved into their dorm. They began a friendship that has saved lives around the globe.</p><p>They take their work more seriously than they do their role in it.</p><p>When I ask them, before an audience of students and community members at Franklin College, what drew them together, McCormack offers up a joke.</p><p>Maybe it had something to do with the fact, he says, “that we both were dumped by our girlfriends on the same day” and needed to commiserate together.</p><p>After the laughter dies down, Farmer and McCormack dive deeper. They say theirs began as a friendship of ideas. They traded books and arguments back and forth in a near-frenzy. They both had a passion for social justice.</p><p>The moment, though, that they acknowledge a great seriousness of purpose, they revert to school-boy teasing again. Farmer reminds McCormack that he got the better grade in calculus. McCormack tweaks Farmer about picking up his dry cleaning.</p><p>In many ways, theirs was an unlikely pairing.</p><p>Farmer lived a large part of his childhood in a salvaged tuberculosis testing bus with his parents and five siblings. His father worked as a teacher, his mother as a cashier at a grocery store. They parked the bus in a trailer park in rural Florida.</p><p>McCormack is a self-identified “rich kid from Cleveland.” When he was young, his family summered in Scotland, where he, a competitive golfer, played some of the finest courses in the world.</p><p>The differences in their upbringing became source material for their teasing, but not an obstacle to their friendship.</p><p>When Farmer found both great need and his life’s work in alleviating suffering and poverty in Haiti, he asked McCormack to help.</p><p>They were young, not long out of college. With two other friends their age or younger and older Boston philanthropist Tom White, they founded Partners in Health.</p><p>Out of that youthful initiative has grown an enterprise that has built hospitals, provided essential medical care and strengthened health-care systems in Haiti, in Peru, in Rwanda and elsewhere.</p><p>They complemented each other. Farmer, in addition to being one of the finest medical minds of his generation, had a visionary’s gift for identifying need and determining hands-on ways to meet it. McCormack had a keen understanding of organization and finance.</p><p>They understood each other.</p><p>They trusted each other.</p><p>When they set aside the joking, their reverence for each other is clear. McCormack speaks of Farmer’s “vision” and “commitment” in hushed tones. Farmer describes McCormack as “chivalrous.”</p><p>To call them friends, Farmer continues, is misleading.</p><p>“More like brothers,” he says.</p><p>As they talk, I can’t help but think about the audacity of their lives.</p><p>When they were young – so young – they set out to save lives and maybe even save the world. They both say that they and Partners in Health haven’t done enough, but the truth is that thousands – maybe even tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands – of people are alive today who wouldn’t have been if not for their efforts.</p><p>What drives them?</p><p>Faith.</p><p>Much of that faith is religious, but much of it also is based in human beings’ ability to honor their best instincts.</p><p>There’s a quote on the Partners in Health website. It’s from Margaret Mead, and it reads:</p><p>“Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has!”</p><p>That was true 40 years ago when two college freshmen became friends.</p><p>And, those friends say, it’s still true today.</p><p></div></p>