My parents in 1951

In 1951, my parents Dr. John and Clara Schmidt founded and ran a leprosy station in Paraguay, South America. After 20 years of devoted service to ease the suffering of cast out untouchables, they were asked to leave.

They’re gone now. But before they died, they asked me to tell their story.

My husband Ed and are humbled and honored to accept that charge. After five years, we have completed most of our research and have begun writing the story of my parents’ remarkable journey.

But finding the truth can be a slippery slope. Although we know that Truth — with a capital T — is unattainable, as writers of nonfiction, we have an implied contract with our readers: The way we represent the truth is, to the best of our knowledge, the way it happened. Anything that intentionally or unintentionally fools the reader violates that contract.

Alternative perspectives and interpretations of the Truth often exist. For example, written documents describing the reasons for John and Clara’s departure from their beloved leprosy work in 1971 are vastly different.

Depending on the source, here are some of the presumed reasons:

• Dr. John’s character was gruff and unyielding, leading to power struggles with both local and U.S. sponsors of the leprosy work.
• He ran his own herd of cattle alongside the herd belonging to the leprosy station, and unfairly favored his own.
• It was Dr. John’s dream to rehabilitate leprosy patients who were under treatment, by giving them a plot of land and a hut of their own. His sponsors rejected his dream due to fear of the disease.
• He was out of touch with the latest treatments for leprosy.
• He handed out birth control pills to women suffering with the dual burdens of too many babies and lazy husbands.
• Dr. John had the pioneering nature needed for a startup, but he did not possess the qualities required to build and grow the work.

You might ask, “Could it not have been a bit of all of these?” That seems to me an unsatisfying and lazy solution to the problem of truth finding.

I deeply regret never having asked my parents their version of why they were asked to leave the work that meant so much to them. All I remember them saying at the time was “It is God’s will.”

Not even my siblings closest to my parents in 1971 can provide consistent insights to help us understand what really happened. One sibling, who was still living at home at the time, remembers our father coming home from the seemingly endless meetings with his sponsors in 1970 with horrendous migraine headaches. Another sibling thinks our dad found it easier to move on to exciting new adventures than to pacify the concerns of his sponsors. Was he moving away from pain or simply galloping forward to the next dream?

See what I mean? Even within our family, the accounts differ, and these versions of the truth are from only two of my seven siblings!

Of course, this is nothing unusual. The line between truth and fiction is very thin. At best, the way we remember things is not necessarily the way they were.

We have a more recent example of this: Special counsel Robert Mueller complained that U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of the counsel’s findings was misleading. In a letter written on March 27, 2019, Mueller wrote that Barr’s summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions.”

Fully capture the context, nature and substance of a truth. The scope of such an undertaking makes me shudder. Is that even achievable? What can Ed and I do to honor my parents with a version of the truth that comes as close as possible to achieving that goal?

I favor the “coherence” view of truth, which stipulates that a proposition about a person is true if it “coheres” or is consistent with other attributes of that person. For example, the belief that “Dr. John was asked to leave the leprosy station because he unethically raised a private herd of cattle on the station,” is true only if that belief is consistent with his other attributes. My father was often gruff and intolerant. But self-serving for his own personal gain he was not.

It is both our privilege and our duty to uncover the complicated web of interconnected and mutually supporting attributes about my parents that will lead us as close as possible to the truth about their remarkable work and lives.