Limbe, Haiti, July 1972: Another morning at Hôpital le Bon Samaritain—the only medical outpost in a tropical valley with no paved roads, telephone, or electricity. From daybreak, patients filled the crude wooden benches of the waiting room. By midmorning, they also covered the floor. The scene was overpowering: Grandparents with rusty sputum and the rattle of tuberculosis; children with tattered clothes and broken bones; infants with swollen bellies, flaking skin, and mustardy diarrhea.
But one of these children was not just undernourished; she was unresponsive. I noticed her skin tone. Amid the rich brown faces of West African ancestry, she looked pale. Belle, a missionary nurse whose ancestry was pure Iowa cornfield, hurried over. She brushed a hand across the youngster’s forehead, gently rocked her neck to check for meningitis, then pulled down her eyelids. They were bloodless.
“Paper white! Hemoglobin’s way down. Add fever and coma. What’s your diagnosis?”
You’re asking me? I thought, terrified. I was just a summer volunteer. I wouldn’t start medical school for two months. In fact, after a few weeks in Haiti, I was wondering if I wanted to start at all.
