In Haiti, battling disease with open-air clinics

The pictures of medical dysfunction were devastating ? broken hospitals in Africa struggling, and largely failing, to contain the Ebola epidemic. As deaths mounted, the problems seemed intractable: no money, no infrastructure, no hope. But across the ocean, Haiti ? a broken country if there ever was one ? now has two new clinics, open-air, modest in size and cost, designed to tackle diseases that can be as insidious and deadly as Ebola, but are also more common: cholera and tuberculosis. The clinics here are simple, even handsome. Instead of constructing hermetic shields in the form of airtight, inflexible hospital buildings, the architects took advantage of Haiti's Caribbean environment, exploiting island cross breezes to heal patients and aid caregivers.