Le Bon Blanc

During a strike in Le Havre in 1926, a 16-year-old French Communist roughneck named Roger Riou battled cops in the streets. Thrown into reform school, seemingly incorrigible, he soon taught the Marxist gospel to 100 other inmates and then led them in an unsuccessful attempt to escape. That episode landed him in solitary confinement, manacled wrist and ankle. Last week, on Haiti's Ile de la Tortue (Turtle Island), Roger Riou was no longer fighting cops. Instead, he was ministering to the people's spiritual needs and physical ailments. The ex-kid brawler is now a Roman Catholic priest as well as a physician.

Marx v. Machetes. Roger Riou's father, a chef on the liner Ile de France, was a rabid Communist, his mother also a dedicated Red. So thoroughly did they train their child that Roger was selling the Communist newspaper L'Humanite on sidewalks at the age of nine. At twelve, he was militating in a Communist youth gang, apparently convinced on his own that Communism was the answer to mankind's problems. During the long hours of his stretch in solitary at reform school Roger began to doubt Red doctrine. Later, the sympathetic director of the school persuaded him that he could do more for humanity by becoming a priest than by passing out Communist pamphlets.

Appointed pastor of Ile de la Tortue in 1947, Father Riou saw that the island's 12,000 inhabitants, living six miles from the mainland, had not even the barest medical facilities. On arrival he came across a peasant woman who, having given birth to twins, was cutting the umbilical cords with a machete. Riou opened a crude dispensary and was immediately swamped. He built a room with 15 floor mats on which the sick could lie. After returning to France for a fourth year of medical school to complete the training he had received as an army medic, Riou went back to Haiti and built a second hospital room. Since then, he has constructed wards for 70 patients, a 40-bed TB sanatorium, a mental ward, a maternity ward and an operating room. He even has a dentist's chair where he pulls teeth.

Sitting atop the 1,000-ft. hump that gives the island its name, Father Riou's Notre Dame des Palmistes mission hospital treats 9,000 patients each year for TB, leprosy, venereal disease and a catalogue of other ills. So many come from the mainland to be treated that an outpatient hostelry is being built for them.

Riou's staff is a French husband and wife doctor team, seven Swiss missionary nurses and ten Haitian nurses. The hospital spends $1,000 a month, half from donations, half from patients who can pay (those who cannot are treated anyway). Its beds are always filled; 60 outpatients are treated daily, and there is a waiting line.

Medicine & Baptism. Riou's competitors are voodoo witch doctors, called bocors, whom some islanders still prefer. A few days ago, Riou barely saved an old man's life by stripping a voodoo bandage of rotten leaves from his dangerously infected foot and applying proper treatment. There are other superstitions. Once Riou asked a mother whether she had given her seriously sick baby medicine the hospital had provided. "No, Father," she replied. "Why not?" he asked. The cryptic reply: "He's not baptized yet." Haitian peasants consider a child before baptism only a brute animal on which medicines would be wasted. Riou gave the infant medicine on the spot, made an appointment to baptize it.

A florid-faced six-footer with crew-cut silver hair and bushy eyebrows, Riou rises with the predawn peal of his chapel bells, works a 17-hour day. He finds time to preach an hour-long sermon in Creole each Sunday. "Here all goes well," he wrote a friend recently. "Patients, as usual, are numerous." To Haitians, Father Riou is a "bon blanc"--good white man.

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