The Right Remedy I arrived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti one month ago, stepping off the plane into the thick heat that one can expect in late August. Having just graduated from college, I was ready to make the transition to the working world as secretary of a university in the rural village of Fondwa. Filled with enthusiasm, I was determined not to let the heat and myriad other challenges of Haiti hold me back. Two days later I was flat on my back, knocked out by the simplest of mistakes.  It turns out that the water on my desk was not for drinking after all, but rather for washing my hands. Instead it cleansed me of any strength I had, leaving me with a fever of 103 with no doctors within a radius of two hours.  I found myself at the mercy of the Sisters of St. Anthony, who run the guest center where I live.  Over the next two days, during my periods of lucidness at least, I experienced the Haitian response to illness. All of the resources of the community were mobilized on my behalf, especially the generations-worth of local wisdom that dominates Haitian attitudes towards health.  Haitians, I found, do not live by the motto “starve a fever, feed a cold.”  They religiously avoid foods with oil, which means most Haitian dishes, but there are plenty of special remedies to take their place. The sister who runs the guest center went to great trouble to make me one such remedy. Its basic ingredients were leaves and day-old bread, with a salt content roughly equivalent to the Caribbean Sea. An unexpected benefit of not being able to keep the soup down was a new-found authority to selectively refuse treatments, such as the special tea with a musky yellow color and highly questionable odor that is supposed to help a fever, presumably by making you forget you had one in the first place.  Rest is prescribed for all illnesses, but company is deemed to have a higher therapeutic value. I received near-constant visits from the sisters, the other house residents, and even friendly neighbors. Considering how difficult communication can be in rural Haiti, word of what is happening in the community travels at light speed.  A birthday party at the guest center need not be advertised, for the lively music and clinking bottles will surely turn it into a community celebration. A lost harvest or death of a pig never goes unnoticed, because such difficulties become the burden of family, friends, and neighbors.  In the same way, news of my illness spread by word of mouth, and in the end you might say that it was just the right remedy for me to encounter my new community.  It is not for no reason that health is a community matter in Haiti. In a country with 1 doctor for every 10,000 rural residents, I am not alone in going through my illness without medical treatment.  In my village, 1 in 8 children die before the age of 5, and 1 in 37 mothers die as a result of childbirth. Most children are born at home without the aid of someone with even the slightest training, and clean water is not readily available in most of the region.  In this setting, health becomes a life and death battle that cannot be fought alone.  In Fondwa, the community’s response has been to open a health clinic within the past 10 years with the meager resources available. A project of the Peasant Association of Fondwa, the clinic now serves the roughly 7,000 residents of the area with emergency care and consultations, and specializes in infant care.  It is not yet large enough to bring down the deplorable infant mortality rate, but it nonetheless saves lives by providing such basic services as baby wellness check-ups and distributing baby formula.  I was fortunate that my own illness was cured by a combination of Haitian wisdom and waiting out the storm. My days of delirium in Fondwa left me with two valuable lessons.  Firstly, make sure your water is drinking water, because your stomach knows it isn’t Haitian.  Secondly, count on Haitians to help you, visit you, and care for you in the event of illness, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make your own remedy. Brian D. McElroy, a native of Bloomington, Minnesota, graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2005. He is the Secretary of the University of Fondwa, Haiti’s first and only university in the mountains (www.unif2004.org).  He can be reached at bdmcelroy@gmail.com.