John and Rosianna discuss We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled by Wendy Pearlman. This episode was originally released to subscribers in April 2019.
Content warning: This episode contains brief mentions of torture.
We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled weaves together stories from Syrian refugees while recognizing the multiplicity of their experiences and perspectives. John Green and Rosianna Halse Rojas discuss how to resist the urge to essentialize and simplify complex situations, the act of listening vs. making statements, and moments of human solidarity in the book.
This episode was originally released to subscribers in April 2019. The Life’s Library Discord and subscriptions are now closed after a wonderful three years of reading together. Check out past books at www.lifeslibrarybookclub.com, Twitter, and Instagram.
Life’s Library logo by Bethany Mannion.
John Green: Hello and welcome to the Life's Library podcast. It's John Green here with Rosianna Halse Rojas to discuss We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled. It's not necessarily the most memorable title. It reminds me of how people used to call my book Our Fault in Your Stars or The Fault in My Stars. And I would just be like, whatever. Nobody reads Shakespeare anymore. By the way, Rosianna, thank you for giving me the title of that book. It has proven very useful in my life.
Rosianna Halse Rojas: It worked out alright.
John: Yeah. I would never have called the book that if it hadn't been for Rosianna, so thanks. Man. This book. It's intense.
Rosianna: It was really, really interesting to read people's reaction to reading it and have them have that feeling that I think you and I had after visiting the refugee camps of, oh, now we have all these stories to carry—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —and we're so aware of that responsibility and yeah. I think that reading this really gave me that feeling, too.
John: Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely a lot to unpack here, but I would like to begin by...You know, Sarah and I just got back a couple of days ago from visiting Sierra Leone and learning about the healthcare system there and learning about the work that Partners in Health is doing in Sierra Leone. Work that by the way, is supported by your memberships at Life's Library. So thank you for being members. 100% of the profits from this project go to Partners in Health. And I saw how far a dollar goes there. They work very, very hard with very, very limited resources. When we were in Sierra Leone, I kept thinking about this book and the way I ingest news and in general, how easy it is to isolate yourself from the world suffering. Of course you can't always stay isolated from suffering. No human life, no matter how privileged is able to like, remove itself from pain or from loss or anything like that. But it is difficult to make yourself proximal to suffering. And one of the weird things about the way we ingest news now is that even though we are surrounded by bad news all the time, and it feels like everything is collapsing around us and we have access to like, all the world's bad news stories. In a way I think, because it's so overwhelming and because it's like drinking from a fire hose, we often don't make ourselves really close to, you know, the suffering of people who are in intense crisis or intense need. And in a way, I think our news feeds, even though they're extremely negative somewhat insulate us from the reality and complexity and depth of crisis.
Rosianna: Yeah, absolutely. I think that depth is a really important word there because it seems like we take on so much, but in a very shallow way.
John: Right.
Rosianna: In a way that makes it possible for us to kind of bear the reality of, of having to move on to the next thing, because there's always some new, big, urgent, you know—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —exclamation point situation. And I think that—I mean, Syria is so reflective of that, for one, and Sierra Leone, too. Like, there were these moments where it was making the front page, where it was getting attention.
John: Right.
Rosianna: But you lose the kind of specificity of the human experience in that. And I think that's something that this book does so beautifully is that there are stories and people that we revisit in different chapters, and it's a continuation of their story, but it also—it is at a scale of suffering that is extremely hard to process.
John: Yeah, it certainly is. And the scope of loss, what's been lost in the Syrian civil war, is really difficult to take in. You know, I mean, because it's not just the lives that have been lost, although there are so, so many of them. It's also a generation of people who've been denied access to education. It's a generation of people who've gone from comfortable lives. As we saw when we visited that refugee camp, people who have not only had to go through tremendous trauma, but because of dislocation have had to go through that trauma completely separated from the worlds that they know. And so it's a completely different thing to experience terrible loss when you're surrounded by your community than it is to experience terrible loss when you're surrounded by strangers.
Rosianna: Yeah. And I think in one of the stories, one of the—writes about—is this repeated sense of trauma and this repeated dislocation.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Every time you move somewhere new or every time something different happens.
John: Right.
Rosianna: I mean, and part of it also, I think is what I think Wendy Pullman writes so wonderfully about in her introduction. You have to resist that singular narrative about this experience.
John: Right.
Rosianna: So you both have to find a way to—yeah, as you say, kind of put yourself close to something that is also at huge scale and resist the urge to make it simple.
John: Yeah. Yeah. We want to essentialize these stories. Like we want to imagine that there's one kind of poor person. We want to imagine that there's one kind of refugee. We want to imagine that there's one kind of trauma. And one of the things I really liked about this book was that because it took kind of an oral history perspective, it refuses to let you settle into any single narrative.
Rosianna: Yeah, and the way it places certain stories next to each other as well.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: Someone will say something and then the next person challenges that.
John: Right.
Rosianna: I was really interested by that general approach to it. Of like, how do you talk about something? How do you acknowledge the fact that you're mediating something? You're standing between the storyteller and the audience.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And yet still be true to that story. Like I find—I think that's such a huge challenge.
John: Yeah, I liked the fact that it started with such a long introduction. Because I thought that introduction, it was a way of grappling with that and acknowledging it at the outset, even when she said one of the perspectives we don't have in this book is the perspective of people who are sympathetic to the regime.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I mean, she acknowledged that. I find it hard to be sympathetic to the Assad regime, but then again, she's right that I don't hear those voices.
Rosianna: Yeah. And that's something that a lot of people are pointing to in the Discord, like that sense of—they want more, they want to hear more about, that perspective. And people who, you know, maybe don't have their sympathies with any particular group, but who just decided that they've kind of put their heads down and carry on
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And that we're able to do that.
John: Right.
Rosianna: For whatever reason, too.
John: Yeah, one of the things I found so heartbreaking was that at the start. You see how people believe a better world is right around the corner. How freedom and a more just society is about to happen through these protests. And then you see each little step where things get more and more challenging and complicated until eventually we're plunged into civil war.
Rosianna: Absolutely. There's a number of stories that talk about this sense of suddenly belonging to a country. That the protests made them feel like, oh, I am Syrian and I—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —have this sense of unity and community. And then how that shifts and moves away and there's a sense of like, well, I'm, I'm not part—a lot of people disidentified themselves from it. Some didn't, but disidentified themselves from the place and saw it as separate from them because of what they felt it had done to them.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And yeah, it's just, it's really heartbreaking. And it's also—one thing I was kind of repeatedly struck by over and over again was how young Syria is as a country, which I don't think I ever properly kind of had a sense of. I think, was it 1946 or 1947? I have such a shockingly poor knowledge about colonial history other than the way we were taught about it and I'm trying to, you know, correct that, but I think in my head, I didn't think of it as a country that had been created as part the era, because it is such an ancient region. I didn't think of it in that way. And then it made me, I don't know, it just made me really hyper-aware of that and how that kind of came into play with all of it.
John: Yeah, and new nation states are fragile nation states by definition, right? Because a nation is a made-up idea. Like the United States is both real and not. It does have laws. It does have, you know, deals with other nations acknowledging its nationhood. But if we all collectively woke up tomorrow morning and decided like, I am not from the United States, I am from the nation of Indiana, we would have a problem on our hands. And that's one of the really difficult things to grapple with about post-colonial states—is that they are very new. When I was in Sierra Leone, I actually met someone who was like my dad was friends with this guy. And this is the guy who made the seal, like, the seal of the nation. The crest of arms that is the symbol of the nation.
Rosianna: Wow.
John: Because that's how young the country is.
Rosianna: Wow.
John: I think I made a video once about Syria, where I talked about the number of times the Syrian flag has changed in the last fifty years. All the things that we associate with stable nation states, we tend to associate with nation states that you know, were not colonized or existed before the twentieth century. For new nations. It's very, very difficult. I just think we underestimate how difficult it is and how important stability is. You know, like in the United States or the UK, you guys might fight about Brexit and God knows you are fighting about Brexit. Um, I don't know when this will actually go out to our subscribers, but I'm sure you'll still be fighting about Brexit.
Rosianna: Yeah, I have no question about that. It'll still be relevant.
John: But you're not fighting about whether the United Kingdom is a nation.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And in the U.S. when we fight about politics, we're not fighting about—we're fighting about what kind of country we want to share. We're not fighting about whether we want to share a country.
Rosianna: Yeah. And it's not to diminish the gravity of some of those conversations, but it's—that stability—it makes so much more possible.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And when you have power concentrated in very small ways—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —the people who have that power have such a huge amount of impact in terms of how they frame every single one of their actions.
John: Right.
Rosianna: So that kind of theme throughout We Crossed a Bridge of this push to make it a sectarian thing, this push to make it about Shia and Sunni, this push to really play into that almost clash of civilizations idea, but on a kind of internal scale—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —all the people were—they didn't say no, it was never about that. It was never ever about that, but they got to do that and make us seem like monsters who were trying to tear each other apart because it was beneficial to them. And because, you know, frankly, they had the larger microphone.
John: Right. They had the megaphone and also there are always going to be divisions within any reform movement. I can't tell you how many times I've been part of a community that started out with—and Nerdfighteria is one of them—that started out with like straightforward ideas of its own goodness and a great deal of certainty and unity in its own goodness, only to have, over time, the complexity of reality challenge those notions. And as more power becomes available, people disagree over who should have it and how it should be organized and how it should be doled out. And it's inevitable. But what we see in Syria, what we see in other civil wars, what we saw in some ways in the United States civil war, was that, on like just a much larger scale that just leads to, I mean, stunning devastation.
Rosianna: Yeah. It also made me think about how we frame it kind of from a Western perspective, too. How there was this kind of a self-awareness in that sectarianism idea—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —behind it, because they knew that that would play into—I think, at least. My feeling is that they probably weren't—there was an awareness that it would play into the way the West talks about the rest of the world, but especially any country in the Middle East or any country in Africa, even—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —like this idea of that kind of conflict being a very easy thing to hook on to. And so, in some ways that being as part of their PR for the war, too, and how we have a responsibility as readers of the news, or as listeners, or just as people to challenge that—I don't know that impression of it. But I think it can be quite hard when you don't feel like you have all the information or you don't—when you don't really know, because historically you haven't really listened to certain voices. It can be sometimes hard to know where to begin, whether what you're reading and listening to is kind of a fair or inclusive, I don't know, reporting of it, in a way. I think that's why so many of us feel this kind of influx of information and trying to piece together from, you know, experts and so on and books like this that help. But I think that I can understand that sense of overwhelming-ness—overwhelmed-ness? Of being overwhelmed that a lot of people expressed in the Discord. And just in general, I think when people talk about Syria, when people talk about the refugee crisis and so on.
John: Yeah. There's an element of, it just feels like a mess, right? Like there's an element of, it's so big, it's so complicated, I am small, it feels distant. And I remember that during the Balkan wars in the early nineties. Like I remember being completely unable to separate the different ethnic groups and the different rivalries and what nation states were going to form out of Yugoslavia and what weren't and who was fighting over what and who was good and who was bad. And it was never as simple, as good or bad. And I remember feeling completely overwhelmed by that. And I think that that's one of the ways when problems are complicated or when stories are complicated, we tend to struggle to pay attention to them, even when we know they are very important.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Because we have our own lives and our own lives are complicated. And we are living amidst our own set of extremely complicated ever-shifting power structures and shifting senses of identity and everything else. And so it can be really difficult to make yourself close to complicated stories, but that is a propaganda strategy. Like it is a propaganda strategy to make things seem complicated. To make things seem like, oh boy, who knows, you know?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Russia or Ukraine? I don't know that's—on all sides, I think all sides use that as a way of trying to get people not to pay attention or not to pay attention to the narratives that would be damaging to them.
Rosianna: Right, because it's uncomfortable. It's choosing being uncomfortable. And I don't know. I think we're also kind of in a period where everyone—it's kind of like expertise or bust. If you're not an expert on something, you shouldn't think or talk about it. And I think we have to all learn and it's something I'm trying to learn to be even more comfortable with not knowing something, but still persevering. Still reading more about some things, still talking about things and listening and just because I don't know absolutely everything about something is no reason to hide from it or hide from pursuing it.
John: Yeah. Right, you don't want to be embarrassed about your lack of expertise because the truth is very few people are experts. Almost always in life, you're just better off asking questions and listening. Like, when we were in Sierra Leone, Sarah was recalling the first time I went to the gallery where she worked. And I had a huge crush on her. And I'd read a book about contemporary art and I'd read up on the two artists who were featured in this gallery show that Sarah was working at, and I went to the gallery and I was ready to make statements, you know? Like I was ready to make statements about these artists who I had researched and this work that was new and I hadn't seen before, but I had read a book on contemporary art. And so I made statements. And of course I seemed like a total fool, because there's no way that I'm going to know as much about contemporary art as Sarah.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like, not just then, but ever. And what I should have done and what did not occur to me was to ask questions. And we were recalling that because when we were in Sierra Leone, there was almost never an occasion when either of us needed to make a declarative statement. What we needed to do is ask questions because we were not there to impose solutions. We were there to learn more about the solutions that people are finding for these very challenging problems. And when you liberate yourself from that feeling of needing to make declarative statements, I just think you learn a lot faster and you learn a lot more.
Rosianna: And I think sometimes people don't know which questions to ask and even where to begin—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —because it feels like such an uncomfortable place to be in. But that's, I think part of learning to be in that position and learning to be the listener, be the person who doesn't always have the answer or the statement. The other—I mean, I was thinking about that also, there was someone in Aloe, S Lynn, who wrote in response to people asking that they didn't know how to read the book and didn't know how to talk about the book. They wrote, "I need to step out of an English lit mindset and into more of a social sciences way of engaging with the text, I think. I'm trying to ask myself, what does this mean politically? What does this mean socially? What does it mean for our global society and for my society? And also what does this mean for me? What action does it call for me to take?" And I was wondering, how do you approach things, John, when you read books like this and when you're talking about them? What are the things you think about?
John: A recurring theme of when I try to listen to people whose voices are not usually heard is that they are grateful that their voices are being heard and that their stories are being told. Like, I was very, very nervous about bringing my camera, for instance. I'm sorry to keep talking about Sierra Leone, but we literally just got back. I was very, very nervous to bring my camera into intense, difficult moments in people's lives, you know, as an outsider, as a stranger and every single time, people would say, no, please film this, because they want to be heard and they feel like they haven't been heard. So I think one of the things that reading books like this does is it listens. It's a way of listening to people who, because of power structures or because of the vagaries of fate, haven't been able to share their stories in a wider way. Like haven't been able to share their stories on a broader platform.
And I think just that has value. I think sometimes we undervalue how much just listening matters and how much it can lead to lasting change. I think one of the responses to reading something like this has to be both anger and chastening. Anger in the sense that—I am angry about what has happened in Syria. I am angry about the scope of the refugee crisis. I am angry about the dehumanization of people who have survived the civil war and the way that they are being portrayed by those who would argue that their existence or their existence outside of Syria is inherently a threat to other people instead of seeing them as—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —you know, as people who have been forced to flee their home because of persecution and I'm angry about that. But I'm also chastened in the sense that reading these stories, like we said earlier, you see how a dream becomes a nightmare. And so you have to be very careful while you are dreaming. I think you have to be very careful while you are fighting for a better world. You have to remember that there is complexity here and that you have to be able to hold competing ideas in your mind. You have to understand that there are risks or nuances you may not be seeing yet. And I feel like that really penetrated very deeply for me.
Rosianna: Yeah, absolutely. There's a line that I actually saw a lot of people also citing the discussions that really stuck out with me. It's from Adam's story—it's right at the very end of the book. And he says, "I see my job as trying to support these people who want to make their dreams come true. But I think I'm too old to dream now. In a month and a half, I'll be 29."
John: Oh, god.
Rosianna: It just that kind of weariness of it.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And there's people who say differently and who are in different headspaces about it. But I think for me, that really struck me. And I think it's nine years now since, um, the Syrian, well, the Syrian civil war...I don't even know how to talk about it. Like, do I say the civil war started?
John: Right.
Rosianna: Even that—
John: Yeah, it's not nine years since the civil war started, but it's not—it's nine years since the events that led to the civil war started.
Rosianna: Right.
John: But then again, you could date it back much further, right? You could date it to the beginning of the Assad regime. We tend to begin with the protests because the protests led to X, which led to Y. But of course there were things that led to the protests.
Rosianna: Right.
John: So it is hard to date. But I think for, you know, a 29 year old—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —the journey that they've been on in the last nine years is, of course, an incredibly difficult one.
Rosianna: And to be that hopeless, that at 29 to feel like that is too old, too old to learn.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: There's a kind of that feeling of lost time then.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah, I feel like I encounter over and over again with people who've been pushed away from their homes.
John: Yeah. That's something that you hear a lot from people in refugee camps that more than anything it's just empty—it's just lost time.
Rosianna: Yeah, and that sense of waiting. Yeah.
John: Right. Yeah. I mean, because it isn't home and it isn't permanent, but when months stretch into a years or decades, what is permanent, you know?
Rosianna: I also found the parts about torture really, really, really hard to read, but they were—the way that they talked about their experiences was—there were some lines that really kind of pierced me. There was that line about sound entering you in a different way. It was like the sounds themselves were killing you. Like, it just felt so—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —visceral and it made me wonder whether they'd spoken about it to other people, whether this was the first time they've spoken about it, or whether, you know, for some of them they'd been talking about their experience quite a lot. I'm sure it's a huge, huge range.
John: Yeah. It was very difficult to read about about torture. And I do think it's important to kind of bear witness to what human beings can do for and to each other. Like to understand the range of it and to acknowledge the range of it that this is also human. There's that old line from the Romans, homo homini lupus—man is a wolf to man. And you know, it's true. You know, humans can be astonishingly cruel to each other. But in the end we're not wolves to each other, we're humans to each other.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And it's just that that is also part of the human story.
Rosianna: Yeah. And having mentioned one of the hardest sections to read, I alsoone of the stories that I found so beautiful was about the women who dressed up as brides and protested. And then the old man who had been selling toys, who—the next day—just took away all the toys and just put up four dolls as full brides to mark his quiet solidarity with them. There are these moments of such humanity and solidarity throughout it, too, that don't negate the terrible things that are happening, but also worthy of our attention.
John: Yeah. That's when I found myself crying when reading the book, actually. As much as I found the difficult parts difficult to read, the parts that broke me down were the moments of human solidarity, people's kindness to each other, people standing together, people standing across, you know, expected sectarian divisions and showing kindness to each other. I found that—that completely overwhelmed me. And I think one thing that's important to note is that we are in the middle of the story of Syria. We're not at the end of the story of Syria, even though the book obviously has to end.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And I think in ten years, the sequel to We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled may be very different.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: If you look at Rwanda, which saw a terrible genocide and continues to be a nation state with a lot of problems, you know, like it has an authoritarian leadership structure—I don't want to pretend that Rwanda doesn't have problems. But it's also seeing the largest increase in life expectancy in the world over the last ten years. I think there is a lot of justified hope in Rwanda and about the future of Rwanda. And my hope is that in ten or twenty years, we'll be able to look at the history of Syria and feel a similar hope.
At the end of the book, there was a different person who said that they didn't want to stop dreaming, but that they understood that their dreams needed to change now.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Which also broke—I found very heartbreaking because you want to be able to dream of a perfectly just world and you want to be able to dream of peace and freedom for yourself and for your family and for your community. But sometimes your dreams do have to change. Like inevitably in a human life, your dreams have to change and it's awful the way that the dreams in Syria for many Syrians have had to change. But I don't think that negates the power of the possibility of dreaming itself.
Rosianna: Absolutely not. And that made me think of this other book that you and I both read called The Girl Who Smiled Beads, which is about a young woman from Rwanda and who lived in so many different refugee camps and all across Africa and all across the U.S., as well, I think. It's hard, as you say, to remember sometimes that this isn't the end of the story. And I think part of the way, again, that we talk about it—the West sees, well, obviously all along, they wanted to come to the U.K. or the U.S. so this must be the end of it.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Whereas, you know, every single person we speak to, at some point in the conversation expresses how—for the conflict and pain could go and if they could have any choice, they would go home. And many of them, regardless of whether or not it goes away, would like to go home, too. I think that that's something to be really aware of. That that is also guiding the way we talk about these stories. That some refugees will have resettled. Some Syrians will have resettled in, you know, countries around the world, but that doesn't mean that for them, it's the end of their story, much less for people who didn't.
John: Right.
Rosianna: I don't know. I think it's interesting to me to read it and then also be just so aware of all the other things around it and how we talk about refugees and how, yeah, I don't know. It just comes like such a flat conversation and it just falls into these tropes again and again, that I think this book really wonderfully resists, but then I can also see how some people may be talking about it would try to fit it into that narrative.
John: Yeah, it's very hard to emerge from this book feeling like people started a revolution so that they could go to Europe. Like that's just not the story here. And I really, really struggle to find merit in that worldview, because anybody who's ever left home knows that it is not easy. And like, the further you go from home, the harder it is. We moved to Amsterdam for three months, and it was horrible. Not because Amsterdam isn't a lovely city, but because it is very, very difficult to build a life in which you are surrounded by worlds you don't know and people you don't know and language you don't know and community morals you don't know. And like, that's Indianapolis to Amsterdam, two canal cities where everyone speaks English. I just don't buy that argument at all.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And I understand that nation states need borders. Like I understand that we have borders for a reason, but gosh, there is—to me, there is a lack of serious grappling with the humanity of everyone involved when it comes to the conversation.
Rosianna: Yeah, it's like one rule for one person, one for another.
John: Yeah. No, they welcomed me in Amsterdam. You know what I mean?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Nobody said like, I can't believe you're using our healthcare. Although I did use their healthcare extensively because I needed my gallbladder removed.
Rosianna: Yeah, that wasn't ideal.
John: Yeah. Yeah, no, I don't recommend it. I mean, I do recommend getting your gallbladder out if you need it out. But as Sarah said to me right before I went into surgery, "You know, this is how Andy Warhol died."
Rosianna: Oh, god! Sarah!
John: I know. I was like, what? And she said, "He was getting gallbladder surgery and he never recovered from it." And I was like, "Of all the people you should tell that to, I am not the one."
Rosianna: Oh, man. Yeah, that's not great. That's not great. Well, I feel like on that happy note—
John: We've journeyed so far away from the book—as we always do.
Rosianna: As we always do.
John: But yeah. Thanks, thanks to everybody for reading this book and just for being part of Life's Library with us. It is such a—I hope that you are enjoying this as much as we are, and that you're getting a lot out of the experience. We'd love to hear from you. The Discord is probably the best way for us to hear from you right now, especially since I'm not on social media.
Rosianna: Oh, I thought we were going to get through the entire podcast without that.
John: No. Nope. Nope. I am starting to talk about it less because I think about it less, but then someone will mention something and I'll be like, oh, did you know I'm not on social media?
Rosianna: Well, Life's Library is, so you can find us at @lifes_library on the Twitter and—what are we on, Instagram. @lifeslibrarybookclub.
John: There you go. So you can find us on Twitter and Instagram and you can talk to us there as well. But the Discord is just a wonderful way to have conversations and we're going to be doing a Q&A. Also on the Discord, you can find out more about the work that you are supporting through your membership. If you go to the announcements tab, you can read a little bit about our trip to Sierra Leone and the work that Partners in Health is doing. And also one of the big takeaways for me from that trip, which is that we need to stop thinking about this as a gift and start thinking about it as an exchange, because we have so much to learn from other healthcare systems. We have so much—I think we have a lot to learn from Sierra Leonean healthcare workers and from the ways that people in Sierra Leone are seeking to solve extremely challenging healthcare delivery problems because we have some of those same problems in the U.S. and in Europe and in Australia. And we often don't do a very good job of solving them, which is why there's so much inequality in our healthcare systems. And so, you know, this is going to be a much larger conversation that takes place over years, but thank you for being at the very beginning of it and allowing Partners in Health to do such great work.
Rosianna: Yes. Thank you everyone.
John: I think that's it. I think that's it. Oh, do you want to say something else?
Rosianna: Oh, the only thing I was going to say is our next book is The House of the Spirits and, yeah, those are shipping out right now.
John: The House of the Spirits!
Rosianna: Looking forward to discussing that one.
John: I've never read it.
Rosianna: You haven't? Oh, it's so great. I'm so excited.
John: Nope. I've read different Isabel Allende books, but I haven't read that one.
Rosianna: Oh, that's going to be fun. All right. Well, I look forward to discussing it with you, but we've still got a couple of weeks left, also, in this current reading period. So we will see everyone on Discord and John, it was lovely talking to you as always.
John: Lovely to talk to you as well. Bye, everybody.