Anthropologist Carla Handley is sitting cross-legged in a mud-walled house in a Kenyan village called Merti. She's meeting with a man dressed in a flowing blue robe and a woven cap of red and white.

Serge McGraw is in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Montreal, Quebec H3C 3J7, Canada, and in the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Centre, Montreal. Sarah ...