Pigs and Puddles

This pig and puddle are right outside the front door of our medical clinic in Cite Soleil.

No wonder the patients waiting for us everyday have typhoid fever, diarrhea, malaria, dengue fever, and a host of other water borne illnesses. Hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti's slums have no clean water for themselves or for their children.

As Aristide and Farmer would say, "This is indecent poverty".

Should the baby you see below, examined in the clinic a few feet away from the fetid water and pig, be part of this indecency?

"To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell's flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, ones's sense of how much suffering is caused by human wickedness there is in the world to share with others."

Susan Sontag
(Taken from Paul Farmer's lecture at University of Utah, March 30, 2005)