The sun had already set in Deschapelles, but it was still 90 degrees when Delicier, after a ten hour shift at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, walked into the dimly lit courtyard for our interview.
I had never met him before but, as if to help me to recognize him, he still wore a stethoscope around his neck after leaving his shift at the hospital. We sat down in straight-backed wooden chairs, bugs swirling around the bare bulb above us. As I arranged my notepad and papers, he looked at me with a reticent smile and an open and immediately likable face. Before we began, out of politeness, he let me know he was “on call”, and might have to return to the hospital at any time. To start things off, I asked him about his childhood, his family, his home. He told me he had six brothers and one sister and that he was born here in Deschapelles. He told me that his father had been a stone mason, but work was “rare”. He told me his mother was a gardener. In Haiti a “gardener” means you grow food for your family in the tiny plot around your tiny house, if you’re lucky enough to have either. He didn’t elaborate, answering my questions politely, in halting english, but he became more guarded, quiet.
It came to me then that asking a Haitian about his childhood is far from just the casual small talk it might be in other parts of the world. Many things in Haiti are this way. We moved on. I asked him about school. Delicier had been a good student, a very good student. So good in fact that he finished at the top of his class, every year, and because of that, his school had allowed him to miss a tuition payment when he had no money to pay, which was a lot of the time. As he neared the end of his secondary schooling, with no money, the thought of continuing his education beyond high school was just a dream, nothing more. But then, as the school year ended, Delicier’s principal came to him and told him about a scholarship through an organization called the Crosby Fund for Haitian Education. He encouraged Delicier to apply. A few months later, something that just doesn’t happen in Haiti, happened, and it changed his life forever. Delicier learned that he was to receive a complete scholarship, not just to college, but to medical school. For the next 6 years, the Crosby Fund for Haitian Education would be paying his tuition, books, food, housing, in fact, all of his expenses. Delicier was going to Port au Prince to study medicine.
Six years later, after graduation, Delicier was immediately sent to clinics and makeshift hospitals all over rural Haiti, in some of the most remote, most impoverished regions in the country, perhaps the world. He was sent where he was needed. Where cholera and malaria and the most basic medical care was unavailable. The work was grueling, and exhausting, but he learned how to be a doctor. After several years, and many more posts around the country, Delicier received some news. The Albert Schweitzer Hospital was calling, and they offered him a position, back in Deschapelles. Delicier was going home.
Today, Delicier is a General Practitioner in residence and a respected doctor at the hospital he used to pass everyday as a child. Today his favorite part of the job is pediatrics, working with the children of the Artibonite Valley, as he once was. When I first saw Delicier that night, walk in with his stethoscope still around his neck, I thought he must have been in a rush and forgotten he still had it on. But later, as I thought back on Delicier’s impossible story, from the deepest poverty to a medical doctor at the Albert Sweitzer hospital, I realized that his stethoscope was still around his neck, not as an accident, but as a symbol of the deepest, most profound pride of a man who had been on a journey unimaginable to anyone who hadn’t been on it. As we began to wind down the interview, I asked him if he could imagine what his life would be like today, if the Crosby Fund didn’t exist, if instead of heading off to medical school, he had just walked out into the village streets after high school. He took a long moment, thinking hard before answering, wanting to get it right, then he looked up at me, his eyes shining a little in the half-light, and shook his head. “Nothing. Without the Crosby Fund there would have been nothing”.