Summary
Chapter 3 begins with Kidder's arrival in Haiti. Farmer sent a truck to pick him up, and Kidder rides with a group of Haitians along National Highway 3. The thirty-five-mile trip from the capital Port-au-Prince to the village Cange takes three hours. Once there, Kidder visits Farmer's clinic Zammi Lasante (which means "Partners in Health" in Creole). Kidder follows Farmer on his rounds, watching Farmer interact with countless sick and desperately poor Haitians. The clinic has seventy community health workers, but it is the main source of health care for roughly one million peasants, many of whom travel long distances by foot or on donkey to see "Doktè Paul."

Officially everyone treated at Zammi Lasante has to pay, but Farmer allows everyone to be treated whether they can afford it or not. The clinic's annual budget is around 1.5 million dollars. Some of this comes from Farmer directly, though more comes through donations. (Tom White, from Boston, was the largest donor.)

Kidder follows Farmer through many rounds at Zammi Lasante. The patients all seem to know Farmer well; he knows and clearly likes them. In addition to practicing traditional Western medicine, Farmer gives food and dietary supplements when he can, just as Zammi Lasante promotes health through building schools and water systems.

Farmer often narrates his treatments to Kidder. In doing so, he tries to educate Kidder, but also to speak through him to the larger world, to correct misconceptions about Haiti and poverty. As part of one of these narrations, Farmer explains the Haitian belief in sorcery as a way of explaining bad or tragic events. The most extreme example of this concludes the chapter: while Farmer is doing a spinal tap on a girl, she cries because she is hungry. He also explains the world to the Haitians he treats, educating them on the fact that HIV is simply a virus, not a source of shame.

In addition to getting to know Farmer as a doctor, Kidder learns a bit about his personal life. Farmer had married a Haitian woman named Didi Bertrand four years earlier, and they had a daughter. Farmer divides his time between Haiti, where he lives in a modernized "ti kay" (Haitian peasant house), an apartment in Boston, and Paris, where Didi is earning a degree in anthropology. Though he called them regularly, Farmer did not spend much time with his family. Instead, he dedicated his time to caring for the poor, flying millions of miles around the world to treat them.

Analysis
In Chapter 3, Kidder shows us how Farmer is positioned between several worlds, and how he serves as a mediator and communicator among them. Farmer explains Haiti to Westerners, and Western medicine to Haitians, a little at a time. When in the United States, he lives in Eliot House at Harvard University, perhaps the single most powerfully charged symbol of the educated elite. When he is in Haiti, he lives just slightly better than the peasants he treats. Farmer has, for example, a bathtub in his house, but no hot water. Such positioning establishes Farmer as especially trustworthy as Kidder's guide to this world, and that credibility is underscored by the way Zammi Lasante functions. Kidder notes that his hospital back in Massachusetts has a budget of about $60 million to serve about the same number of patients, or 40 times as much, and that Farmer treated TB for "$150-$200," when it cost "between $15,000 and $20,000" in the United States.

Kidder's portraits of poverty are delivered with commentary—he allows Farmer to provide that—but his sympathies are obvious, and an implicit but clear judgment is communicated: the situation in Haiti is not right, and something should be done.