HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028782 The following excerpts from Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains, a biography of anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer, detail Kim's bold efforts to combat international HIV and tuberculosis epidemics with PIH: Some months after the official founding of PIH, [co-founder] Paul Farmer expanded the group, adding a fellow Harvard anthropology and medical student, a Korean American named Jim Yong Kim... Farmer offered what for Jim Kim was a convincing vision of the new organization. The reality was less impressive -- a charity with a board of advisers and no hired staff... They talked about issues such as political correctness, which Jim Kim defined as follows: "It's a very well- crafted tool to distract us. A very self-centered activity. Clean up your own vocabulary so you can show everybody you have the social capital of having been in circles where these things are talked about on a regular basis." (What was an example of political correctness? Some academic types would say to Jim and Paul, "Why do you call your patients poor people? They don't call themselves poor people." Jim would reply: "Okay, how about soon-dead people?") They talked about the insignificance of "cultural barriers" when it came to the Haitian peasant's acceptance of modern Western medicine: "There's nothing like a cure for a disease to change people's cultural values"... By now Peru was taxing PIH's resources severely. On average, the drugs to treat just one patient cost between fifteen and twenty thousand dollars. And the number of patients kept growing. Already there were about fifty Carabayllanos in treatment. Their average age was twenty-nine. They were students, unemployed youths, housewives, street vendors, bus drivers, health workers. The actual numbers seemed small, but those fifty MDR [a form of tuberculosis that does not respond to standard treatment] cases represented about 10 percent of all active cases of TB in the slum, about ten tim