Did you know?

I have heard many wondrous things from my patients and my students during my 6 years in Haiti, questions that make me want to laugh wildly and firm beliefs that make me want to rip my hair out. Here are a few of them:

"Don't look straight at someone while yawning without covering your mouth. If you do, you have just swallowed that person!"

"If a woman squirts breast milk into your eyes, you will get conjunctivitis."

"If a woman has sex with three men in the same evening and gets pregnant, won't she know instinctively which one is the father?"

 

"When a woman becomes a widow, she also becomes blind."

"If I kiss my husband when I have conjunctivitis and our eyes touch, can he get it too?"

"If you get water on a cut, it will form an abscess."

"If someone gets lemon juice in your eyes, you will become blind."

"Don't drink cold water with hot food because when the hot water and the cold food meet, they will form vapors in your stomach and kill you."

"I feel fine when I walk on pavement, but when I walk on gravel, I get dizzy and my vision gets blurry. What's wrong with me?"

"Ever wondered why Haitian women spit constantly when they are pregnant? It's because your spit becomes poisonous when you are pregnant and if you swallow it, it will poison you."

"Don't let a frog pee in your eyes because that will make you go blind."

"If a pregnant woman who is beyond her fourth month is sleeping and you wake her up, her baby will be born with a cleft lip."