New Hospital Works
Lagonave, Haiti
There is currently one functioning hospital on the island of Lagonave. It is open 24 hours per day 365 days per year. It is staffed by excellent doctors and nurses who carry out life saving work every single day.
The hospital serves as the only place on the island which can carry out caesarean sections and minor surgery. Built in the 1950s by the Wesleyan Mission, the hospitals 33 beds just about coped when the islands population was around 10,000. In the 50s and 60s however the Haitian govt decided to “clean up” the mainland and started dumping people from the mainland onto Lagonave. As a result of this the population boomed and now stands at approx 120,000. Clearly the hospital is at breaking point in terms of capacity and the building from the 50s needs to be upgraded to bring it into the current century.
There is desperate need for a new surgical suite and the building of a Paediatrics clinic staffed by a full time island based paediatrician. In May 2009 LemonAid took Gary Hebblewhite ( Manchester United Football Club Project Manager) and Alan Kypriadis ( senior architect at Marshall Kypriadis ) to Lagonave to visit the hospital. We are delighted to say that Alan and Gary have agreed to come on board with LemonAid in designing, project managing and assisting in fundraising for the all new purpose built hospital. Our dream was to have the first phase of the new hospital built and operational by January 2012 with an original budget of around $1m USD.
In January 2010 however the worst earth quake ever to hit Haiti resulted in over 200,000 lives lost across the nation. The Wesleyan Hospital sustained some damage making economic repair of any section impossible. An entire new facility is now needed for Lagonave. Throughout 2010 many organisations answered the call to help raise funds for a new hospital for Lagonave. Compassion UK, the Message Trust and Lemon Aid arranged a number of events called Heart for Haiti and 12 willing, and not so willing, volunteers scaled Kilimanjaro in a massive sponsorship drive. At the end of 2010 over $500,000 USD had been raised in the UK alone.
Lemon Aid and World Hope Canada submitted a grant proposal to CIDA in November 2010 for around $1m canadian dollars for the Wesleyan Hospital project and await the outcome of the application in Feb/March 2011.
A topographic engineer completed a full site analysis survey in January 2011 (he was turned back on the way to Port au Prince in December 2010 when riots broke out around the capital when election results were announced) of the site for the new Wesleyan hospital including soil sampling and trial pit analysis. A Scottish engineering firm McGregor McMahon have been working with this survey to design structures and foundations that will withstand earthquakes and hurricanes.
Greg Edmonds moved to Lagonave as a missionary with his wonderful family and he has a background in construction. Greg has been overseeing the Haitian workers clearing the site in preparation for JCB drivers moving onto site in March 2011. It is a global effort that will get this facility built. Engineers from Scotland with JCB operators volunteering from Canada and England and Greg and Dan on the ground in Haiti from USA. Greg is currently recruiting brickies/block workers who would like to volunteer their time and assist in building work on Lagonave. Part of the hospital construction project is a new 44 bed accommodation and training centre that will be constructed first. This is for two reasons; 1. The hospital building must be approved by the Haitian IHRC (Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission) before we start to build it and this is taking a while. 2. To keep the cost of the hospital project down we plan to use as much volunteer labour as possible and the new accommodation centre will mean large teams of construction workers can be accommodated. Each team will have a two fold mission; to build the faciltiy and to pass on construction skills to the Haitian construction workers.
If you are a construction worker from any trade and would like to help us build this hospital in Haiti then please email justin@lemonaid.org.uk
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