The example set by Farmer has helped inspire a similar dedication in Haitian colleagues.
"When I was in my family planning residency, I heard about this white doctor who visits sick people in their homes," said Dr. Roland Desire. "I'm from a peasant family myself. I came to see what he was doing." Farmer listened to the young doctor, choking back tears.
He had made this recent visit to the group's clinic in Lascahobas, where Desire was at work, hobbling on crutches. In August, Farmer broke his leg in a bad fall while hiking uphill in a drenching rain to reach a patient. Surgeons sawed his thigh bone in half and put in a titanium plate to repair it.
With his slight build and boyish face, Desire, 31, looks more like a laid back high school student in his jeans and T-shirt than a briskly efficient doctor.
Among those who had come from great distances to see him in Lascahobas were two women -- symbols of how far Haiti still has to go and of how far it has come.
Imitane Pierre had brought her baby daughter Francesca from Port au Prince. Both are HIV-positive, and Francesca had developed painful lesions on her face. Hospitals in the capital had turned them away because the mother was too poor to pay. After two weeks in the clinic in Lascahobas, the bright-eyed girl had gotten better. But now she and her mother had to return to Pierre's other children in Port au Prince, where treatment programs are not yet established.
"We send them home, but who will take care of them?" Desire asked. "There's no one."
Later that day, the doctor turned to Ipoline Occeus, 26. He had to break the news that she was HIV-positive but he coupled it with hope, because she lives in the area served by the clinic.
"You can die from it," she said.
In most developing countries, Desire's diagnosis would indeed have been a death sentence. But he replied with the words that promised her life: We have the medicines. We can treat you.
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