I had listened to Arcade Fire’s new album The Suburbs from beginning to end. I may have been absorbed with something else while I was listening but I didn’t notice this until today when someone posted the youtube non-video for Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).

It was too much of a coincidence to not be one. The subtitle of the song, Mountains Beyond Mountains, is the title of the Pulitzer-winning biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, a man who has given more than any other to improve the health of Haitians. It comes from a Haitian proverb, “dèyè mòn gen mòn,” which means, “beyond mountains there are mountains.” The proverb applies quite aptly to the song where Regine Chassagne might as well be singing, “beyond dead shopping malls, there are dead shopping malls,” or, “beyond the sprawl, there is sprawl.”

I know that Arcade Fire have worked to raise money for Farmer’s organization Partners in Health in the past. Most recently, as I mentioned in a previous post, they vowed to match every dollar donated to Kanpe, a Montreal-based NGO working to rebuild Haiti, up to one million dollars. You can donate $5 to Kanpe by texting STAND to 30333. But a little digging revealed that this band has done a lot more than I was aware of.

Here is highlight reel of Arcade Fire’s charity work from an article in the September issue of Vanity Fair outlining why they are nominated to that magazine’s Hall of Fame column:

BECAUSE, after discovering Tracy Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains, about Harvard doctor Paul Farmer and the organization Partners in Health, which operates 12 hospitals outside Port-au-Prince and employs 5,000 Haitians, the band established a “one dollar, one euro, one pound” touring policy, donating one unit of currency for every ticket sold. BECAUSE they had the N.F.L. pay Partners in Health for the right to play the song “Wake Up” during Super Bowl XLIV. BECAUSE by the end of last year Arcade Fire, whose much-anticipated third album, The Suburbs, comes out this month, had helped raise more than $800,000 for Farmer’s organization. BECAUSE Chassagne and Butler, in 2008, went to Haiti and performed at Partners in Health’s facilities.

That already impressive list doesn’t even include the money they are donating to Kanpe. This outpouring of altruism is certainly not only due to the book Mountains Beyond Mountains (Chassagne’s parents are from Haiti) but the book has had a large impact on a lot of people’s lives beyond the members of Arcade Fire. Many people have become involved in global health after reading it to the point where joining the fight for global health after having read it is becoming cliched (in a good way). I can’t think of many contemporary books that have had an impact that big. If you have a chance, pick it up. If you buy it and read it, I might even buy you a beer so we can sit down and talk about it. Here’s a paragraph of the book that I found particularly compelling:

The transit between Cange and Boston used to jar Farmer back when he was a young medical student. He’d leave peasant huts full of malnourished babies and, arriving in Miami Airport, overhear well-dressed people talk about their efforts to lose weight. The trip was unsettling in either direction. One day he’d be inside the teaching hospitals of Boston, receiving instruction in the highest current standards of medical care, and the next morning he’d be climbing out of a tap-tap, his face gray with dust, into the squatter settlement in the parched high ground about the dam, where there was no medicine, let alone standards of care.

The thought of, within hours, being able to go from a place with a serious lack of food to one where people can’t stop themselves from eating too much is one I can’t get out of my head.