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By NOEL K. GALLAGHER, Staff Writer Sunday, February 4, 2007

Singing a snippet of "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" and chatting among themselves, about 30 volunteers from Portland's Konbit Sante organization stood in a long line snaking out of a Portland waterfront warehouse, passing along boxes of medical equipment to load into a 40-foot container bound for Haiti.

"You can't believe the level of need," said Wendy Taylor, who co-founded Konbit Sante 10 years ago with her husband, a doctor who had served in the Peace Corps in Nigeria.

The group works specifically with a clinic and Justinian Hospital, a 250-bed teaching hospital that has no plumbing, food, fresh water or linens for the patients. Doctors and nurses have only a few random hours of electricity every day, and women arriving to deliver their babies know to first buy a "birth kit" that contains intravenous tubing, surgical clamps and other equipment the hospital may not have on hand.

"There's no running water, and that's in the hospital," said Ann Lemire, an internist pediatrician at Maine Medical Center. Lemire is a Konbit Sante volunteer who makes regular trips to Justinian Hospital in Cap-Haitien, Haiti's second-largest city. "You have to shoo the chickens and the dogs out of the rooms, and the rooster is going off. I'd stand there and say 'I wish someone could see this, because they'd never believe it.' "

Konbit Sante sends two containers like this one - usually packed with about $250,000 worth of medical equipment - to Haiti every year, to benefit Justinian and a nearby clinic. The latest shipment, loaded Saturday, included an array of furniture from chairs to hospital beds, surgical equipment, pipe for water systems and hospital staples such as gloves, bandages and gowns. The goods are donated by local medical groups and hospitals, the local American Red Cross, and others.

Taylor said members of Konbit Sante, which means "coming together for health" in Haitian Creole, decided to focus on Haiti and Cap-Haitien because that was where the need was greatest. Although there are only a handful of Haitian residents in Portland, Konbit Sante successfully campaigned to make Cap-Haitien a sister city to Portland.

Today the group has 12 employees working full time in Haiti, two in Portland and about 70 volunteers, many of whom go twice a year to Cap-Haitien for weeklong visits to help.

Some are medical professionals who do training or education. Others are plumbers and electricians who work on the hospital's infrastructure.

When they started, the hospital's reference books amounted to stacks of moldy medical journals in cardboard boxes. Konbit Sante outfitted the hospital with Internet access, allowing the staff access to the latest medical training and information online, Executive Director Nate Nickerson said.

"We have a long-term commitment with the public health system there," Nickerson said, noting that Justinian Hospital and the clinic are both operated by the Haitian Ministry of Health. "Our measure of success is, after we've gone, there is an improved capacity to care for the patients."

Because of the country's severe poverty, many patients - particularly children ­ are malnourished and never have had preventive care. Throughout the country, more than half the people live on less than $1 a day.

Mary Edwards, a nurse at Maine Medical Center, knows just how far a little money can go. She told her family she would like donations made to Konbit Sante in lieu of Christmas gifts, and the $1,000 fund that was created paid for all the pediatric medication at the hospital for a year. Once the container arrives in Haiti in mid-March, it will be met by about 25 Konbit Sante volunteers from Portland, Nickerson said.

This trip will include both medical and construction volunteers. The construction crew will help make electrical and plumbing improvements, such as providing better backup electricity for the hospital's two surgical rooms, while clinical volunteers will assist with program development in women's health, pediatrics and internal medicine.

Staff Writer Noel K. Gallagher can be contacted at 324-4888 or at: ngallagher@pressherald.com