Haiti.  For many in the international community, the name invokes images of chaos, disaster, poverty, corruption and an unhealthy reliance on foreign aid.  C2C has been working in Haiti since 2010 and has opened two clinics there, one in urban Port-au-Prince after the earthquake and one in northern Camp Coq, a lush, rural village with a subsistence-based community.  I recently spent some time with our clinical team there and had the opportunity to shadow our community health workers (CHWs) during their home visits in the neighborhoods surrounding the clinic.  Despite the language barrier, it was overwhelmingly apparent that the people we serve in Camp Coq are poor and sick from preventable and treatable illnesses and eager for better health.  The people we met asked questions, had story after story about an illness in the household that required time-consuming and expensive travel to the health facilities 40 minutes away by taxi and all were hopeful that the C2C clinic located in Camp Coq would reduce the burden they experience daily of poor health.

It is incumbent on us, on our amazing, dedicated, 100% Haitian clinical team in Camp Coq to a) price our services as low as possible while striving for long-term financial sustainability, b) do all that we can to educate the community about the importance of childhood immunizations, chronic care maintenance and family planning and c) deliver high-quality, personal health care to each and every patient that comes to our clinic.  From what I saw in my brief visit to Camp Coq, we have the team in place to achieve all these things and consequently improve the health of the overall community.   Using a basic market-driven approach, with customer-service, consistency and operational efficiency as core tenets, C2C can build a sustainable primary care model that helps meet the health care demands of the Haitian population, one community at a time.