"Crazy doctor from Germany" and her mission to help Haiti (Feature)

By Michael Kieffer Jan 11, 2011, 12:28 GMT

Port-au-Prince - Barbara Hoefler cannot possibly know all of Port-au-Prince's 400,000 slum dwellers - but they seem to all about her.

Children with large, dark eyes run along next to her, calling 'Barbara, Barbara, Barbara' as the medical doctor navigates her all- terrain van over the bumpy streets of the Cite Soleil - the largest slum area of the Haitian capital.

Since 1998 the now 72-year-old woman has spent most of her time in Haiti, where she has converted her all-terrain vehicle into a mobile medical clinic.

'This is the crazy doctor from Germany,' some local American residents were once heard saying about Barbara Hoefler. Crazy old doctor - this must have also gone through the minds of her old acquaintances back home in Germany.

In the city of Cologne, Hoefler had last served as director of the medical services department the Nordrhein health insurance company. But she was forced to retire early because of a foot fracture. The foot was swollen and some people said she would never walk again.

Still, in 1997 Hoefler travelled to Haiti for the first time, together with a group of people who had taken up donations for the desperately poor Caribbean country.

During that 8-day visit she encountered street children and saw the illnesses they were suffering. For example, one boy who for three months had been plagued by a growth under his foot.

'But I didn't have anything along with me except my handbag,' recalls Hoefler, who for 12 years had had her own general medical practice.

Back home, sitting in her back yard, a decision slowly ripened: she would go to Haiti to work as a medical doctor, for a year. In Germany, she prepared by taking courses on tropical diseases and learning the Creole language. All this at the age of nearly 60.

'And then I arrived here in August 1998,' Hoefler says. The one year she had planned turned out to be longer - she has been in Haiti ever since, supporting the youth services programme of the Catholic church's Don Bosco Mission.

The work has continued despite - or perhaps because of - the devastating January 12, 2010 earthquake.

Hoefler was sleeping when she was awakened at 4.53 pm by a horrifying sound.

'It was like in a nightmare in which a gigantic locomotive is charging straight at you,' she said. Her first thought was that a heavy lorry was driving past and making the buildings shake.

'Then in the kitchen, the shelves collapsed and bottles were smashing on the floor,' Hoefler says. Somehow she managed to get outside into the open.

Now a year later, Hoefler is not optimistic about Haiti's future and she places the blame also on the Haitians themselves, in a view which no politician dares to express openly.

Hoefler says bluntly that many of the 1.2 million people made homeless by the quake had settled down beneath their plastic tarps in the emergency camps and were not at all inclined to help out in the effort to rebuild their destroyed houses.

She places the blame also on what she feels is too strong a subservience to higher authority which is so widespread in the country. But the German doctor from the Cite Soleil district herself has become something of a person of authority in Port-au-Prince.

'I can be really forceful at times,' the 72-year-old says about herself, recalling an incident in a market square. There, a woman merchant begged for a dollar, to which Hoefler shot back: 'I'll buy something from you, but I won't give you anything!'

A man in the Don Bosco order says of her: 'Barbara Hoefler is tough, but she's got a heart.'

So why is she still in Haiti?

'Because I love these children so much,' Barbara Hoefler says. And as she says this, you can hear the voice of this otherwise so apparently resolute woman cracking a bit.

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