What is most extraordinary about Megan Coffee is she does not believe she is extraordinary. The Harvard-educated physician — and Oxford-educated epidemiologist — has spent three years in Haiti, healing the sick. With no pay, with few days off, with no effort to trumpet a selflessness that she doesn’t even recognize as selflessness.

"I practice medicine," says Coffee, 36, who grew up in Maplewood, the only child of two university professors who still live there.

From time to time, Coffee and what she does are rediscovered almost by accident. I knew her before the Haiti earthquake because, as a senior at Columbia High School, she was a Star-Ledger Scholar, an honoree of a now-defunct scholarship program I ran for this newspaper for 22 years. I was sent to Haiti twice in 2010 to write about the Jan. 12 earthquake. On the second visit, I received a cryptic message from a nun with New Jersey ties who lives not far from the hospital where Coffee works. It read, simply: "Megan says hello."

I found Coffee — Dokte Kafe in Creole — running a tuberculosis center in a tent in a courtyard of the hospital run by the University of Haiti, not far from where, in my first visit in January, I saw hundreds of corpses piled up like cordwood in the hours following the earthquake that killed more than 100,000 men, women, and children in a matter of hours.

Unlike most of the hundreds of doctors who came from throughout the world to treat earthquake victims, Coffee stayed, and is there still. And still, while raising money for a foundation to help Haitians, she avoids personal attention. She thought it odd I would want to write about her then.

She had a similar reaction to her depiction as the hero Coffee is in a new book by Amy Wilentz, another woman from New Jersey.

"Although it’s just so weird to read about yourself in print, Amy was obviously remarkably kind," Coffee said about her description in "Farewell, Fred Voodoo," Wilentz’s second book about the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere.

Wilentz is a name woven through state history. Her parents were Robert Wilentz, the late chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, and Jacqueline Wilentz, a forceful advocate for public education. Her grandfather was David Wilentz, the state attorney general who personally prosecuted the Lindbergh kidnapping trial and became New Jersey’s most powerful political operator.

Amy Wilentz, 58, is a journalist who first traveled to Haiti in 1986 to cover the overthrow of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier for Time magazine. She lived there two years and, afterward, visited regularly. Her latest book, published by Simon and Schuster, is a pessimistic valedictory. She is not impressed with the efforts of the international community, philanthropists and celebrities to help Haiti’s people.

She writes about the "terrible frustration of impotence" that pervades the country and "white kings" like former President Bill Clinton and actor Sean Penn who may be using Haiti to chase away their own demons. Wilentz’s love for Haiti began with the end of the Duvalier dictatorship, and she is troubled by Duvalier’s return following the catastrophe.

One of the few lights in the book, the brightest, is Megan Coffee. Wilentz also found Coffee by accident when the writer’s brother, a cardiologist, visited the hospital.

"In so many ways," Wilentz writes, "Dr. Coffee is the ideal foreign-aid delivery figure. She’s creative; she’s responsive. She lets Haiti teach her how to deal with Haiti. She doesn’t care if she gives her patients spaghetti with Russian dressing in the morning, if that’s what they want, if it feeds them and helps them gain weight. She figures out how to pay for what the hospital won’t pay for and her patients cannot pay for."

She helps individuals and she doesn’t use cash as an exchange so there is no room for the "maneuvering, corruption or profit-seeking that has been the ruin of many larger, more carefully planned outsider projects in Haiti." She calls Coffee "the least pretentious of voices."

Coffee plans to remain in Haiti but says she will turn some of her work over to others, primarily through a foundation she established, Ti-Kay Haiti. Its website is tikayhaiti.org. She has a Twitter account: DokteCoffee.

"An individual is not important. Good medical care cannot rely on one person — it’s not sustainable," Coffee tells me. She says she wants to work in Haiti both as a physician and as a scholar, studying the spread of disease in ways that will help more people than those she treats individually.

Wilentz was roughly the same age as Coffee when she first came to Haiti. She doesn’t mean to return. The "Fred Voodoo" to whom she bids farewell is the name foreign journalists gave typical Haitians, a kind of John Doe or John Q. Public. She says goodbye with a sadness mixed with the attraction to the place many — including me — feel. I’ve been there three times as a journalist and never as a tourist. You can leave Haiti but Haiti never leaves you.

One reason Wilentz offers is chilling. Perhaps, she says, we see Haiti as our future, some sort of "post-apocalyptic dystopia" with "its deforested countryside and overpopulated and crumbled urban landscape." She adds, "Maybe, I sometimes fear, this could be the future for all of us."

It could be generational, or maybe a matter of profession, but Coffee is more optimistic. She has practical things to do. In her last e-mail to me, she described her personal future:

"I am not planning on leaving this project. I just want it to be more sustainable. No one person could do all that we’ve been doing for this TB program. It needs to have a lot of people and systems in place to make it continue working, no matter what."

No matter what.

Follow @starledger

MORE BOB BRAUN COLUMNS