Fighting for life on a street corner in Haiti
On July 3, 2014, Wilflo Fontus was robbed, shot in the neck and left for dead in broad daylight.
TABARRE, Haiti
Wilflo Fontus was one semester from finishing his degree in engineering and becoming the first of his family to graduate from college, at the age of 29. While completing his studies he worked at St. Luke’s Hospital just outside of Port-au-Prince, his salary helping to pay his tuition and support his siblings. On a quiet afternoon in July he was walking down the street, having just left the hospital, when thieves approached him and shot him in the neck.
This type of violence, of meanness and brutality, is not something I tend to speak about at our events, in our materials or on the St. Luke website.
I don’t omit violence to be disingenuous, and in fact we discuss the security situation with potential visitors in great detail. The omission is rather an active choice to highlight a less visible part of the complex reality of Haiti by focusing on people fighting for progress, people bringing peace to chaos and compassion to pain. There are far more Haitian people shining light than bringing darkness, but these people don’t get much attention — and so, we focus on the light.
The St. Luke Foundation for Haiti employs over 1,000 Haitian staff. Its Haitian-led programs include two hospitals, three clinics, 32 schools, clean water and housing, agriculture, disaster relief and more. Over 60,000 patients per year find medical care at St. Luke facilities. Over 12,500 students find education through St. Luke schools. More than 6,000 families have been provided crucial support in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew. With so much important work to sustain, we’re hardly focused on spreading the word about violence.
Nonetheless, it’s there. For our staff on the ground, there is no way to miss it.
When Wilflo was shot, our team responded with outrage and urgency. He was rushed to a local trauma center where he was stabilized and then transferred to a private facility where he rested and slowly recuperated.
The shooting was a great shock to our leadership. They were not naive to the dangers, but this was different: steps from our hospital gates, a hospital employee, traveling from one program to another.
Wilflo was shot on a 100-yard patch of road connecting two hospitals, St. Luke’s and St. Damien’s. Rocky and dusty, it’s an uneven stretch that sees mothers, fathers, children, families and staff bustle back and forth each day. St. Luke’s is for adults, St. Damien’s for children.
We increased security and police patrols in the area, enacted stricter rules for transport, placed barbed wire atop walls and gave safety training to staff. In addition to these traditional responses, the St. Luke team decided to clear the street that connected the hospitals, in cooperation with local government.
At the time of the shooting the road had been populated with merchants — entrepreneurs in the informal economy of Haiti. Men and women selling food, drinks, phone cards, toiletries, cigarettes and whatever else the families of hospital patients might need. Several stands had become small sit-down restaurants, with walls of pallets or re-purposed aluminum. The businesses were not actually supposed to be there, according to local ordinance, and they had been dispersed on other occasions. But with the significant foot traffic from our hospitals providing a built-in market for goods, the merchants always came back. Our own staff would eat at these stands, and their presence had become unremarkable.
After the shooting, this changed. St. Luke’s leadership team saw that the stands created hiding places from which thieves could surveil and prey on staff and patients. So the team contacted the local government and worked with officials to clear out the shops.
Two days after the shooting I was driving from one hospital to the other, and as I passed near the stretch of road where Wilflo was attacked, I saw an exchange that made me slow and watch. There I saw a colleague of mine named Domo Saintrelus stopped on the corner in his old, abused Geo Tracker. He was speaking to a large Haitian man, who was scowling down at Domo with his hand in his pocket.
The majority of the 1,007 men and women who work for St. Luke have clearly defined jobs, titles, backgrounds and specialties. They are doctors, accountants, nurses, teachers, agronomists, administrators, technicians, cleaning staff, maintenance workers.
There are a handful, however, whose job titles would be very hard to pinpoint. There is a good deal of activity in Haiti that is physical, practical, old fashioned, git-er-done type work that requires persistence, attention to detail and stamina. Domo is part of an informal but vital crew that manages these jobs at St. Luke. He brings medical oxygen from our production center to our hospitals. He carries the dead for funerals. He unloads containers of goods. He plants trees. He harvests tilapia from our fish farm. He goes on hurricane relief missions. He drives volunteer teams to and from the airport. He installs water systems. He is dependable, reliable and conscientious. He is not a leader by title, but if you spend any time at all with St. Luke, you’ll see that wherever there is work being done, Domo is nearby.
I watched Domo there on the corner and I slowly realized what was happening. Domo, unarmed, was explaining to the man that he could no longer loiter on that corner. The man was not impressed. Still Domo leaned out, explaining with a stern calmness that standing on that spot, with no purpose, was no longer permitted — not after what had happened.
No one was watching this exchange. No one asked Domo to do this.
Domo surely knew that standing up to this man, on the very corner that saw his friend Wilflo shot in the neck two days before, could be fatal. And yet, he continued to lean out his window, continued to shake his head and gesture evenly. Finally, the man moved along.
The bullet had entered through Wilflo’s neck and resulted in a burst fracture of his fourth cervical vertebrae, which bruised and compressed his cervical spinal cord. The result was that Wilflo could not feel or move his legs and could barely move his left arm. In the days and weeks that followed, Wilflo made slow and hard-earned progress, physically and emotionally fighting against long odds. He engaged in light physical therapy but remained tentative, careful not to inflict further damage.
We wrote to everyone we could think of in those days. Seeking opinions, badgering surgeons, looking for a specialty center that would accept Wilflo. Our doctors in Haiti are excellent, and we believe fully in our medical programs, but we needed to be certain that every possibility was examined. We also needed to be certain that Wilflo would know forever that he had received first-class care.
Eventually Wilflo was accepted at Allied, a top-level physical therapy center in Scranton, Pennsylvania. There he received care for body and spirit, and he made remarkable progress.
Two and a half years later Wilflo, now 32, is still unable to walk and has only partial use of his left arm. And yet he has clearly defeated the faceless, nameless cowards who sought to take his life.
When he returned to Haiti, Wilflo moved into a small house behind St. Damien’s. A few months later he petitioned to lead social services at St. Luke’s Hospital, a job that would allow him to assist the most needy patients and families. He asked for the job. He asked to be given a job that required him to travel over, by wheelchair, the very corner that he was shot on, twice a day, every day, in order to help others with their pain and their troubles.
Wilflo’s story is indelible. An undeniable example of what human beings, at their strongest, are capable of. The image of Domo standing up to the man on the corner is perhaps more subtle, but it has stayed with me as well.
Most of us reading this article don’t live the same reality as Domo. Most of us are fairly privileged with respect to our day-to-day safety, and most of us are not often confronted with the kinds of dangers that Wilflo fell victim to and that Domo stood up against.
Domo’s courage is not an indictment of our less perilous lives. The idea is not that we ought to feel guilty about our relative safety, just as we ought not feel guilty for having clean water, schools for our children, health care for aging parents and decent housing when it rains.
We can, however, refuse to accept conditions for others that we would not accept for ourselves. We can allow Domo and Wilflo to serve as inspiration, and we can choose what we do and do not accept with the same obstinacy as Domo. Martin Luther King Jr. called it being “maladjusted” and expressed a commitment to never grow accustomed to poverty and injustice.
I saw Domo a few weeks ago, and I reminded him of the days that followed the attack on Wilflo. He listened, nodding, and when I arrived to the part about him insisting the man on the corner move along, a small smile crept across his face. He chuckled, in the nonchalant way that he does, and said, “I had no choice. We don’t accept that.”
Being maladjusted — standing up for the human family — doesn’t have to be as dramatic as it was that day for Domo. But it is an active choice.
Wilflo will be honored at our annual event in New York this year. That night, we will bear witness to his story, honor his current work at the hospital, and more broadly celebrate and support the work being done by the St. Luke team in Haiti.
By taking the time to read this far you’ve done more than you could have. I hope you’ll also consider attending our event in New York, sharing the invite with others, or making a gift in Wilflo and Domo’s honor.
The image of Domo taking a stand on that corner two years ago, and of Wilflo crossing over that spot in his wheelchair each day, can remind us what we’re capable of.
