MORE ABOUT HAITI
Anesthesia Machine
Early in 2009, Sister Jackie Picard emailed us with a request to find an anesthesia machine for Hospital Alma Matre -- the hospital in Gros Morne that she, Father Wilner Donecia and a group of other community leaders had recently taken over management of. The one they had finally died and they desperately needed another.
Dr. Don Clayton said that they had a spare one at the recently opened Clarian Arnett Hospital in Lafayette, IN and made arrangement to donate it.
Doug Granlund picked it up and made a solid packing crate to ship it in to provide protection for this delicate piece of equipment (especially when considering the terrain it would be transported across once in Haiti!). This machine was about six feet tall and it had several drawers in its base. When shipping things to Haiti, it is not the weight that determines the cost, but rather the cubic size of what you are sending.
We do not like to send "wasteful" things as packing material when we ship, so we packed the drawers and empty spaces surrounding the machine with many other useful items such as surgical gloves, gauze, bandages, hospital blankets and sheets, hospital gowns etc. All of this added weight (which did not matter) yet provided necessary protection (which did matter!) When finished packing, this entire sea container weighed over 1,000 pounds.
St. Mary parishioner John Blichmann donated to cost to send this crate by Fed-Ex to Lotmore shipping in Miami, FL.
St. Mary Cathedral then shipped it through Lotmore to Port-de-Paix (a city on the northwest coast of Haiti). This is much closer and easier to transport to Gros Morne than sending it through Port-au-Prince. It was not long before this machine was up and running in Gros Morne's hospital.
Click on the thumbnail to see a larger picture. Use the arrows to the left and right of the thumbnails to see more pictures in the gallery.
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