Haiti receives an enormous volume of foreign-funded health projects, some sponsored by religious institutions, many run inside the secular apparatus of global health. Minn looks at the Haitian professionals who make those projects run and shows that the parties involved judge whether an intervention worked by different and often incompatible standards.

Haitian physicians, nurses, and administrators are hired to carry out programs, to hand out resources or refuse them, and to produce the accounts of outcomes funders read. Working as intermediaries, they are expected to represent the humanitarian aims of distant donors and to care for patients with almost nothing, while also serving as a source of support for their own relatives and managing their own prospects under conditions of scarcity and insecurity.

Taking these clinicians seriously, Minn argues, is what makes it possible to stop casting them and their patients as heroes, villains, or victims, and to think past the donor-recipient pair framing theories of humanitarianism and the gift.