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6. Chlamydia patient: Shit-hole houses like this dot the landscape of rural Haiti. But all misery has a local history and an often extralocal political economy. This family lost its land (and of course house) after a hydroelectronic dam pushed local peasant farmers up into the arid hillsides. We met her when she came to the clinic for a readily treated infection. Her toddler, however, has many of the classic stigmata of protein-calorie malnutrition; even the infant, still breastfeeding, is malnourished. Thus does a "readily treated infection" reveal, at least to us, a whole string of problems that, because their origins can be traced back to mean-spirited decisions by the powerful, also demand attention. This is how our clinic got into the housing business.
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