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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.