Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, North America

/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM: A ‘Leaf Doctor’ Serving Haiti’s Poor

Rebecca E Kessler

NEW YORK, Nov 23 2004 (IPS) - Madam Ti Zo, nearly 100 years old, has lost track of how many babies she has delivered in six decades as a “medsen fey,” “leaf doctor” or traditional Haitian herbalist and midwife.

Call her what you will, her work is helping sick people and pregnant women in her thatched hut home on the banks of the Jacmel River outside the port city of the same name, home to 30,000 people on the southern peninsula of Haiti. She treats any number of maladies with her small arsenal of resources: local ingredients, a little antiseptic ointment, some rough-looking massage and prayer.

Madam Ti Zo, translated as Mrs Little Bones (and whose real name is Madeleine Desrosiers), is profiled in a new film of the same name by American filmmaker David Belle, which made its U.S. debut earlier this month at the 28th annual Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival at the American Museum of Natural History.

Wearing a dress and harmonious head scarf in pinks, blues, greens and white, overlaid by a dark sweater against New York’s fall chill, Madam Ti Zo overflows with warmth as she animatedly describes her work in Creole, translated by David Belle in his comfortable Manhattan loft. She visited the United States for the first time for the film festival.

The healer says she treats a lot of sprains, broken bones and soreness, as well as fevers and intestinal parasites. In the film she orders a treatment of aspirin and boiled, bitter orange leaves with salt and peppermint for a boy she has diagnosed as having food hardened in his stomach and a case of worms.

“Lots of ingredients are brought to me in my dreams. What I see is what I give,” Madam Ti Zo says in the movie. She credits the 10 years she worked in a hospital, God and herbal traditions passed down in her family as the source of her medical knowledge.

“In Haiti people are born and die right before your eyes,” says Belle, echoing a narrative line in ‘Madam Ti Zo’. The film captures this immediacy starkly. Haiti is beset by extreme poverty, ongoing political upheaval and crippling natural disasters, such as September’s Hurricane Jeanne, which killed as many as 3,000 people and displaced many more.

Life expectancy for Haitians was about 50 years in 2002, according to the World Health Organisation. Per capita spending on health in 2001 was 22 U.S. dollars, compared to 4,887 dollars in the United States.

As of 1992, the last data available, there were 8.4 doctors per 100,000 people working in the country. Herbalists are the first line of defence for many sick people in Haiti, especially in rural areas, where 40 percent of the population has no access to modern healthcare. According to WHO estimates, about 20 percent of births occur outside a health facility.

“Stand up on your two feet. Stand up. Stand up,” Madam Ti Zo commands a woman in one of the film’s most vivid scenes. The woman has had scarcely a few minutes rest after giving birth, and hauls herself to her feet with the help of a rope tied to the hut’s rafters and the midwife’s helpers. The scene, dimly lit and cluttered, is far from the sterile hospital environment typical in the United States.

Madam Ti Zo delivers babies as casually as she prepares bananas for a meal, and this one is quickly cleaned up, her umbilical cord snipped and bandaged, and swaddled in old clothes. She says she has delivered as many as five babies in a day – including her own. The mother of 12 children, she describes giving birth in the field while picking peanuts, and carrying her new baby home in a basket.

“Anyone can be a doctor but you need to be patient and loving. If you aren’t patient and loving you can’t do the work God gives you,” Madam Ti Zo says in the film.

Over the years several people have expressed an interest in learning her trade, but she rejected most of them, feeling they were too greedy and would exaggerate prices. She hopes instead to pass her knowledge on to her youngest great-grandchild, a bright-eyed five-year-old named Madeleine.

‘Madam Ti Zo’ is the second of Belle’s intended six-part documentary series capturing Haiti’s elderly citizens and traditions. ‘Words of the Elders'(2001) is the first.

When the filmmaker returns to Haiti later this month, he will begin work on a piece about a voodoo priest. The remaining three films will feature a painter, a fisherman, and, perhaps, a farming family, says Belle.

“Portraits of inspiring people are in the end more important than exposes,” he states, referring to another vein of his work. Belle has made several critical, investigative films about the United States, exemplified by ‘Abandoned: The Betrayal of America’s Immigrants’, co- directed with Nicholas Wrathall in 2000.

He and his crew spent about a year filming ‘Madam Ti Zo’. Much of the initial time was spent without cameras, getting to know the leaf doctor and her patients, family members and others who live with her, watching her days unfold.

The goal was for everyone to be comfortable with cameras and crew, enabling the unobtrusive, cinéma vérité feel to the documentary, which has no interviews or soundtrack and minimal narration.

In getting to know Madam Ti Zo, Belle says, “it was amazing to see not only her command of medicine but also psychology. At the same time she was running this 24-hour clinic she was raising her grandchildren and taking care of a whole slew of people living with her.”

As a citizen of the hemisphere’s richest nation living in the hemisphere’s poorest nation, “I have a responsibility to share what I can,” he adds.

At 32, the filmmaker has divided his time between Jacmel and New York City, where he grew up, since 1993. He has embedded himself into the life of Jacmel’s community and says he helps residents meet their health care needs when he can.

Belle helped establish the two-year-old Jacmel Art Centre, or “Sant d’A Jacmel”, led by Haitian artist Patrick Boucard. It aims to bring education and economic development to the region through its gallery and art classes.

This summer the centre orchestrated the first ‘Festival Film Jacmel’, free and open to the public. It featured movies by and about Haitians, a rarity in Jacmel, where foreign action films dubbed into French are the main offering. Debuting there was ‘Madam Ti Zo’, reflecting a vision of real Haitian life through a close, compassionate lens.