Health and Social Justice: A Call to Action

I live in a small rural village called Fondwa, located high in the mountains south of Port-au-Prince in the Department of Léogane, Haiti. On the surface, my life is not so different from that of the peasants around me. I wake up early in the morning and walk through the market on my way to work. The lack of electricity and running water somehow make my experience more "authentic." I eat beans and rice. Everyday.

Yet, in the work I have done documenting the lives of Fondwa's residents, the fundamental differences are all too clear. When I ask the community's granmoun, or elders, if they went to school, it often elicits a toothless grin and a chuckle. "Where would I have gone to school," they say, "and who would have worked the fields?" They really begin to question my intelligence when I ask what they do for a living-Mwen travay tè-I work the land (of course). When we get to health care, I hear stories that would be harder to imagine had I not trekked down the mountain, across the river, and through the valley to visit my interlocutor's house. "When someone was sick," an elder explained to me, "we would take down a door to use as a stretcher and walk to Léogane, where there is a hospital." Léogane is six-to-eight hours on foot from Fondwa. "The person often died along the way, but we had to try."