Church provides portable clinics in Haiti

A&M United Methodist Church was in Haiti when the 7.0 magnitude earthquake shook the ground. A portable medical clinic built by church members, two miles from Port-Au-Prince, survived the disaster, and the church is building three more clinics to send to the Haitians.

"I learned last year that it had been in Haiti, but that didn't mean anything at the time- then to hear that it survived the quake and it was still helping people," said senior history major and A&M United Methodist church member Samantha Shrauner. "I can't contribute that much monetarily as a college student, but to know that something I did in the past is able to help people in this horrible situation, it's something that only God can do."

The clinic from College Station was the only clinic that survived the earthquake in working condition. Before the disaster the clinic was seeing 60 patients a day, but since then that number has increased.

"It was not the only clinic in Haiti," said project manager for the church David Brochu. "Prior to the earthquake, Christian Alliance had eight to 10 clinics in Haiti."

Building the clinics begins with an empty ping container, sent to the work site by Christian Alliance for Humanitarian Aid. Volunteer workers will equip the container with air conditioning, a refrigerator, electricity, and plumbing. There is a waiting room, two exam areas and a lab area when it is finished.

"It's just a big empty box at first," Brochu said. "When you look on the inside once it's finished, it'll look like a little doctor's office. It is able to provide a secure and somewhat clean place to treat people."

The church has been involved with the project for about two years. The second clinic was ordered before the earthquake hit, but after media attention, the church is expanding the project. Last week, $10,000 in donations were received.

"We just got a tremendous response," Brochu said. "Everybody was getting so fired up about it that we thought maybe we need to think about expanding this project a little bit."

After a meeting last week, the church decided to build three clinics instead of one. With continued media exposure, the church kept receiving checks, calls and offers to help. The offers to help came from all over the community, including student organizations and other churches.

"It's really cool that they're doing three. We're doing something that we couldn't do by ourselves," Shrauner said. "We need God for this. It's not just this one little church anymore, it's all of the community that has come together to work on this project."

The three clinics have arrived in the church parking lot, and the work is set to begin on Saturday. Brochu expects to have three teams laying flooring, while three other teams build frames. He hopes to have 25 to 30 people working simultaneously in order to complete all three clinics in six weeks. Engineers Without Borders is helping the church to achieve that goal.

"The whole idea of Engineers Without Borders is to help people worldwide," said senior civil engineering major Robert Sudbay. "Our goal is just to provide our time and our service. They had the money; they just needed the help."

Each clinic shell costs $6,000, and furnishing it costs approximately $5,000. The church is nearly able to pay for all three clinics to be delivered and furnished, but they are still accepting donations. Any money received above what is necessary will be used to equip the clinics with first aid supplies.

On Saturday, Slovacek's will be donating half of their receipts to the portable medical clinics and the other half to CARPOOL.

Senior pastor Kip Gilts said he is excited about the possibility of providing students and community members a way to serve the people of Haiti with more than just monetary contributions.

"Being in a university community, we want to make the ministries we do have some relevance and make an obvious difference," Gilts said. "We want to be relevant to students who are really looking for religion to have some relevance about it and not just people meeting together on Sunday and singing the same songs they've been singing for hundreds of years, but also doing something that makes a difference in people's lives."

Donate Each clinic shell costs $6,000, and furnishing it costs $5,000. The church is nearly able to pay for all three clinics to be delivered and furnished, but they are still accepting donations.