January 25, 2008

Miracle of faith: Dedication of Visitation Clinic gives hope to people of Haiti

Andy Telli, Tennessee Register

PETITE RIVIERE DE NIPPES, Haiti. The people of Petite Riviere de Nippes in Haiti filled the narrow, dusty dirt road led by a teen-age boy carrying a crucifix. They marched under a bright sun and a clear blue sky from St. Antoine Church in the center of town around deep potholes, over broken bridges and past small concrete huts, rusted truck beds, women washing clothes in streams, and playing children.

At the edge of the town, they started up a steep drive, at the top of which sat their hope for a better future.

They crowded onto the porch of the new Visitation Clinic, with views of the lush mountains on one side and the shimmering Caribbean on the other, and listened in the afternoon heat as Theresa Patterson thanked them for their patience and their faith.

After Bishop Alix Verrier of Les Cayes, Haiti, blessed and dedicated the building and the dignitaries were about to cut the ribbon to the clinic, Patterson and the people of Petite Riviere shared a sense of jubilation and excitement.

“I got excited … for everybody to see the clinic after all these years,” said Patterson, who lives in Nashville, Tenn.

As executive director of the Parish Twinning Program and the Visitation Hospital Foundation, both based in Nashville, Patterson has been nurturing her vision to build a hospital in Haiti for 12 years. The opening of Visitation Clinic is an important step that Patterson and others believe will lead to their ultimate goal: the construction of a 75-bed full service hospital on the site.

“We haven’t gotten to the mountain top yet,” Patterson said. But from the clinic, the goal of the hospital looks much closer.

“Until right now, this has just been ideas and paperwork,” said Dr. Tom Grabenstein, president of the Visitation Hospital Foundation Board. “Now, it’s reality.”

After the dedication ceremony was complete, the people of Petite Riviere filled the new clinic to get their first, eager glimpse of the building they’re counting on to improve their lives in many ways.

“There are a lot of people who are sick and there’s not a hospital in the area, and a lot of people are dying,” Father Valery Rebecca, pastor of St. Antoine, said through an interpreter. The clinic will also be a source of much needed jobs for his people, he added.

Dr. Grabenstein, who has made at least 35 trips to Haiti, mostly as part of medical missions with his fellow parishioners at Immaculate Conception Church in Clarksville, Tenn., is confident the clinic, and later the hospital, will change Petite Riviere in many ways. “There are two good Catholic schools there, but when they graduate, there is nothing for them to do … but move to Port Au Prince,” he said.

At times, as many as 60 people were working on the construction of the clinic, Dr. Grabenstein said, and within the first year, the clinic will have about 20 employees.

The clinic and hospital also will attract other businesses to the town, said Father Edwige Carre, a native of Haiti and the pastor of Holy Name Church in East Nashville.

“Once you have a clinic here, automatically you will have people coming here to open businesses,” explained Father Carre, who traveled to Haiti for the clinic dedication on Saturday, Jan. 19. “They know if something happens to them there will be a doctor here.”

Access to health care is difficult in Haiti where there are 30 hospitals to serve more than 8 million people.

People from all over the area will come to the clinic and hospital in Petite Riviere, said Dr. Rony Jean-Francois, the medical director of the new Visitation Clinic. “We’re going to work a lot for them.”

“He is just so attuned with the philosophy and mission of the clinic,” Patterson said of Dr. Jean-Francois.

At the outset, Dr. Jean-Francois will lead a staff that will include another doctor, three nurses, a pharmacist, a lab technician, and the clinic administrator. All but one of them will be Haitians.

“We felt it was extremely important to put the majority of the staff into the hands of the Haitian people,” Patterson said. “It’s got to be their project.”

The facilities at the clinic will allow the staff to offer a variety of outpatient, surgical procedures, Dr. Grabenstein said. It will also offer visiting teams of American doctors better facilities for outpatient surgical procedures than have been available to them in the past, he added.

Dr. Jean-Francois is already planning on using the clinic to house training programs for medical staff such as nurses and lab technicians.

Plans also call for the clinic to be the location of community-based outreach programs such as a nutrition education and food bank, tuberculosis prevention and treatment, Vitamin A distribution, STD/AIDS prevention and treatment, midwifery and breastfeeding education, oral rehydration in homes, distribution of bed nets to reduce the spread of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases, water purification and an agricultural program.

The clinic is stoking interest from American doctors and others who want to visit Haiti for medical missions, Dr. Grabenstein said. “It’s very true, in this land of medical mission work if you build it they will come.”

Pressing on

Dr. Jean-Francois has worked in the area before. As a young doctor, he worked at a hospital several hours away from Petite Riviere and would visit the town once a week with a mobile clinic.

He is eager for the clinic to be expanded to the hospital.

“I want the clinic to become the Visitation Hospital in one or two years,” he said, offering high-tech equipment and several areas of specialized care.

There is a sense of relief that the clinic is finally done, Dr. Grabenstein said, but he’s looking forward to the next challenge, which is the hospital. “I want to press on.”

Patterson said the clinic staff and the board of the Visitation Hospital Foundation learned a lot during the construction of the clinic that will help with the planning of the hospital.

She estimates they will need about $3 million to build the hospital.

Patterson would like the clinic to operate for one or two years “to get our feet wet” before starting construction of the hospital, assuming they can raise the money, she said. That experience with the clinic will give them a better idea of what they will need in the hospital.

‘Absolutely amazing’

For 30 years, Haiti and its people have been her love and her passion, Patterson said during the dedication. That’s how long she has been working with the Parish Twinning Program, which links parishes throughout the United States with parishes in Haiti, offering all types of assistance and support.

Currently, there are 353 Catholic parishes and church congregations of other denominations in the U.S. twinned with 210 Haitian parishes and 39 other projects such as schools, hospitals and nutrition programs, Patterson said. Some Haitian parishes are twinned with two or more U.S. parishes, she explained.

And Patterson is always looking for more parishes in the United States to get involved. “I’ve got a long list of parishes waiting to be helped,” Patterson said.

The idea to build a hospital in Haiti came to Patterson in 1996. But she’s quick to share the credit.

“It’s not my accomplishment … it’s all the fantastic people who’ve been so supportive,” Patterson said.

Several of those people traveled to Haiti for the dedication.

Patricia Scherer and Jim Scherer of Nashville made a significant contribution toward the construction of the clinic. An illness made it impossible for Patricia Scherer to attend the dedication, but Jim Scherer was there.

“I was extremely pleased with the location and the quality of the construction, including even the landscaping,” Scherer said. “The mountains on one side and the sea on the other are quite breathtaking. It’s as if hope is sprouting all over the place for people who have not had hope for so long.”

Scherer recalled a meeting with the residents of Petite Riviere eight or nine years ago to discuss plans to build Visitation Hospital. “I remember one impassioned plea,” he said of a Haitian man at the meeting. “‘Please Mr. Jim, build us a hospital.’ He was about crying when he said it,” said a still emotional Scherer.

“I extend deep appreciation to Theresa Patterson and her staff and the local people who made it happen and Twinning Parishes who support the work of Theresa,” Scherer said.

Mary Clare and Nino Incardona of Memphis donated a mobile, digital X-ray machine for the clinic in honor of her brother, the late Dr. George Ludwig, who is considered the father of ultrasound technology for medical uses.

“We just felt it was an appropriate thing to do for my brother,” Mrs. Incardona said.

Their trip for the dedication was their first to Haiti or the clinic. Mrs. Incardona called the clinic “absolutely amazing.”

“I didn’t expect it to be as large … or as sophisticated,” she said.

The dedication was also the first visit to the clinic for Alan Dooley, the Nashville architect who donated his services to design it.

“I thought it looked better than I expected,” said Dooley, who credited the Haitian engineer and contractor for the project, Abdou Fal, with building a clinic “well above Haitian standards.”

Dooley designed the clinic with sustainability in mind.

Because electrical service in Haiti is often unreliable, Dooley explained, the clinic will receive all its power from 38 solar panels attached to the roof. There also is a solar water heater on the roof of the clinic, he said.

Rainwater from the roof will be collected, filtered and pumped to the clinic’s water tower.

All the appliances selected for use in the clinic are low energy users and the clinic will use low-flow toilets, all to reduce the use of power and water as much as possible, Dooley said.

To help keep the clinic cool, the central corridor was designed with a tall ceiling lined at the top with clerestory windows, “which was a common way to cool basilicas,” Dooley said.

The roof has deep overhangs to shade the walls, Dooley added.

Even the landscaping was designed with sustainability in mind. Frances and Mike Sosadeeter of Sarasota, Fla., who designed the landscaping, used as many native and edible plants as possible, and used native palm trees the help shade the clinic, Dooley said.

Others helped with the design by donating their services, Dooley said, including Nashville electrical engineer Tony Pezzi; Roger Wehby and Larry Medlin of Rock City Mechanical; Gould Turner Group Architects who have experience designing hospitals and medical facilities; Robert Lownes who created a rendering of the clinic; and Charlie Wehby, Jack Goodrum, Chris Remke and Joe Connor, who served in an advisory capacity.

“My work has never been so appreciated,” Dooley said of the Haitians’ reaction to the clinic.

‘I always had faith’

Before the dedication, Bishop Verrier celebrated a special Mass. During his homily, he called the dedication a “miracle of faith.”

“The Catholic Church is a family and all of us our brothers and sisters,” Bishop Verrier told the overflow crowd of Haitians and Americans. It was the people’s faith and love “that brings us together today.”

Despite the many years that it took to complete the clinic, “I always had faith it was going to happen,” said Father Rebecca. “I put my hope with God and with Theresa Patterson.”

Photos by Andy Telli

A worker finishes the landscaping at the new Visitation Clinic in Petite Riviere de Nippes, Haiti. The clinic, which was built by the Visitation Hospital Foundation, based in Nashville, was dedicated on Jan. 19. A delegation of representatives of the Parish Twinning Program and the Foundation, traveled to Haiti to attend the dedication.

The people of Petite Riviere crowded into St. Antoine Church for a Mass before the dedication of the Visitation clinic. Many in the crowd (photos above and at left) were forced to watch the Mass standing in the church balcony.

Bishop Alix Verrier of Les Cayes, Haiti, extends the sign of peace during the Mass. His diocese donated the land where the clinic was built.

Father Edwige Carre, a native of Haiti and pastor of Holy Name Church in Nashville, translates the bishop’s homily for the Americans who traveled to Haiti for the clinic dedication.

Nashville Bill Link, shows some of the children of Petite Riviere how to use the scale in the new clinic. After the dedication ceremonies, the residents of the area, flooded into the clinic for their first look at the facility, which will provide much needed health care in the region.

Theresa Patterson, executive director of the Parish Twinning Program and Visitation Hospital Foundation, scoops in the first shovel full of concrete for the sign at the end of the drive leading to the Visitation Clinic. The people of Petite Riviere, who were erecting the sign when Patterson arrived, watch.

Patterson greets Frances Sosadeeter, who with her husband Mike, (talking in the background with Nashville architect Alan Dooley) designed the landscaping. Mrs. Sosadeeter is the coordinator of the Parish Twinning Program in Spanish-speaking countries.

Click here to view Visitation Hospital Dedication Photos.