Sarthe Neighborhood Clinic staff

This post includes an audio interview. See link at the end.

The Haitian Development Fund serves the medical needs of residents in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood called Sarthe. For almost a decade, HDF has provided critical care to the mothers and children who visit the Sarthe Neighborhood Medical Clinic, which is “smaller than a Chicago bungalow,” says board member Greg Richmond.

Though the clinic isn’t spacious or high-tech, the Haitian medical staff that runs it has treated more than 67,000 patients, Richmond told SendHelp2Haiti in a phone interview. The clinic’s annual budget of $35,000 goes a long way in Haiti, where many people live with no plumbing and electricity and get by on only a few dollars a day.

Richmond, a Chicagoan, first visited the clinic in 2001 with a friend, Dr. Brent DeLand, who had been going to Haiti on medical missions for about 10 years. After the trip, the two men decided they wanted to do more to support the clinic and went about raising money to pay the salary of its doctor and other medical staff.

Richmond and DeLand, who lives in Springfield, Ill., make personal contributions to support the clinic and raise funds from other individuals, small family foundations and religious charities. An order in Italy recently sent an $8,000 grant.  Money raised helps buy medical supplies such as bandages and aspirin and equipment such as examination tables, Richmond says.

The Sarthe neighborhood is bleak and its residents live in squalid conditions, says Richmond, describing a place marked by drainage ditches filled with garbage and sewage and people sitting outside their cinder-blocks houses selling whatever they can to get by.

Patients in line outside clinic

“On one level, what we do is relieve suffering,” Richmond says about HDF’s work in Haiti. “But beyond that, what a lot of people don’t appreciate unless you live there is Haiti is a tropical country. And if you have an infection in Haiti—and you don’t have antibiotics, you don’t have ointments—in that heat and humidity, [the infection] doesn’t heal unless it’s treated. Those types of infections stay infected and can spread and lead to amputations or death. One of the things that struck me in the time that I was there was how rare it was to see someone who wasn’t maimed.

“What our clinic has been doing is providing that kind of medical care.”

Since the Jan. 12 earthquake, HDF has stepped up its fundraising efforts to meet the critical need for additional medicines and supplies to treat the many who were injured. “Everyday there’s a line of people waiting to be treated,” Richmond says, noting the clinic did run out of supplies after the earthquake. But the clinic is “functioning, treating people [and] we are getting medicine and supplies to the neighborhood.

“We are very glad the clinic was there… For years to come, the need is going to be overwhelming.”

For more information about the Haitian Development Fund, visit hdfund.org.

Click here to listen to our interview with Greg Richmond of the Haitian Development Fund.