Serge Pierre Louis found that being Haitian wasn’t easy when he arrived in the U.S. to study medicine in the early 80s. His homeland meant AIDS to most Americans. “It was very painful,” he says. “It took a whole decade for people to understand that this epidemic was also taking place in other parts of the world.”
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Pierre Louis is president of the Chicago chapter of the Association of Haitian Physicians Abroad, a 22-year-old group providing health care to Haitians worldwide. Now that democracy has returned to Haiti, the organization has resumed sending doctors back to the island after a three-year break. Pierre Louis, who heads the epilepsy program at Cook County Hospital, was in Port-au-Prince this summer. “On the one hand things are very hard because of the legacy of the UN embargo,” he says. “On the other hand I was very pleased to see a renewed commitment to vaccination and health care for the poor.”
