Years ago a young man from a tight-knit community found himself headed for Harvard Medical School. The whole community was so excited. There was a small hospital that served the community, and they just knew that the young man, upon completing his studies, would come back home to set up practice.

            As it turns out, he did not come back. After completing medical school and an extensive internship in infectious diseases, the young man joined Doctors without Borders and devoted his life to serving the poorest of the poor. He gave up the opportunity to have a lucrative medical career among family and friends and chose instead to live on a very basic salary with people he did not know.

            You would think that someone who gave his life to serve the most desperately needy people in the world would garner respect and admiration from people who knew him. But that is not what happened. On a visit to family one Christmas, the young doctor was in the local grocery store with his mother. On more than one occasion, he was accosted by people who knew him and his family with one or more versions of this criticism: “So you think you are too good for us. Because you are sacrificing yourself for others, you think you are better than us.”

            The young doctor was baffled by the response. What he did not know or understand is that people can move quickly from admiration and even adulation to anger when their expectations are not met. Under different circumstances the townspeople may have been proud of his decision to serve the poor. But they had decided in advance that he should live among

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