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By Annan Boodram |
May 2002: In an article distributed by the Associated Press, journalist Michael Nortonwrites about the practice of Vodoo in the treatment of AIDS patients in Haiti. Norton refers to Philippe Castera a voodoo priest who consults with the spirits and often tells the AIDS patient to lie in a coffin for 24 hours.
The treatment isn't intended to attack the virus but the evil spirit believed to be causing the illness. Seeing the patient, Castera enters a trance, during which he says one of the spirits possesses him.
"If the spirit makes me slap my right thigh, I can work a cure. If it is the left thigh, he is incurable," the 49-year-old priest says.
As he speaks, he runs a cheese grater across a human skull to create a powder, which he puts into an elixir for the patient to drink. The red-and-black coffin is supposed to help weaken the evil spirit.
With an estimated 5.2 percent of its 8.2 million people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, Haiti has one of the highest rates of infection in the Caribbean. Like the country's mainstream medical community, Haiti's voodoo priests have had to turn their attention and efforts to treating the disease.
Castera and his wife, voodoo priestess Jeanette Joseph, treat every ailment from lovesickness to cancer.
"We are not the doctor. The doctor is the spirit," Castera said.
Every month, about 400 people seek consultations with the couple. About half say they have AIDS, though the Casteras do not test for the virus.
A consultation costs about $6.30, while a complete AIDS treatment can cost up to $4,000.
Patients looking for help slip into the couple's treatment center - dimly lit rooms decorated with multicolored scarves and altars strewn with lit candles, sequined bottles of rum and perfume, swords and rattles.
Later, Castera said they urge patients to visit a Western-trained doctor because they believe modern medicine also can help.
This year, about $8 million is being put toward fighting AIDS in Haiti, coming from donors including U.N. agencies, the United States and the Netherlands.
"The amount allocated to Haiti will probably increase slightly next year," said Dr. Eddy Genece, director of a Haitian group, Promoters of Zero-Objective in the Spread of AIDS. "But even so, the level of assistance will be woefully inadequate."
Current programs are devoted to prevention, focusing largely on education, distribution of condoms, surveys and some testing. No drugs are being distributed to the infected and little care is available.
But at one health center H.I.V. infections are controlled as effectively as in America. And the success at this health center, sponsored by Partners in Health, a nonprofit charity affiliated with Harvard Medical School, could be replicated all over the world if the wealthy nations chose to provide the financing. The barrier to the use of AIDS drugs for all H.I.V. patients is not some physical or educational impossibility; it is lack of will.
The center is in Cange, an impoverished village of small houses with corrugated roofs and dirt floors. There and nearby, care is delivered with skill and personal attention comparable to that in American teaching hospitals.
The compound was begun in 1983 by Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist now at Harvard Medical School, and the Rev. Fritz Lafontant, a Haitian Episcopal priest. Working with Dr. Farmer and Jim Yong Kim, another American physician-anthropologist, are Haitian doctors and nurses and about 200 community health workers, who make this model of health care succeed.
About 1,400 of the patients have H.I.V.; of these, 100 of the sickest receive the advanced medicines used to treat AIDS in the United States and now function normally. Their care is supervised by the local health workers, who are trained at the clinic. The health center's operations are financed by donations, and the doctors will treat another 100 desperately ill patients with the AIDS drugs if they can persuade drug companies to donate them.