Build Health International Drives Past Obstacles to Aid the Needy in Haiti and Beyond
In response to the August 14 earthquake in southern Haiti, Engineering Record took a deep dive into the operations of Jim Ansara’s health care non-profit, Build Health International.
On Aug. 18, Build Health International’s Jaresiah Desrosiers landed at the airport outside the shaken city of Les Cayes in Haiti’s southwestern Tiburon Peninsula. It was four days after a magnitude-7.2 earthquake devastated the region, killing more than 2,200 people, injuring nearly 12,300 and damaging or destroying nearly 136,800 mostly one- and two-story buildings. And it was just two days after Tropical Depression Grace dealt another blow to the Americas’ poorest nation, which hasn’t recovered politically from the assassination of its president, Jovenel Moïse, on July 7. Desrosiers, who was joining the Beverly, Mass.-based BHI’s Haiti staff already at work doing damage assessments at hospitals and a few schools, was on a mission to help coordinate the logistics of the nonprofit health care infrastructure consultant’s recovery efforts—from offloading and delivery of emergency equipment flown in from the U.S. to constructing a temporary trauma and orthopedic surgery center to treat the injured.
The BHI-built Saint Boniface Hospital, which has seismic resistance and rooftop solar, survived the Aug. 14 quake relatively unscathed. Photo by Terry Sebastian
Desrosiers, a BHI project manager with a background in facilities management, was also hand-delivering critical surgical supplies to Saint Boniface Hospital in Fond-des-Blancs, expanded by BHI for the nonprofit operator, Health Equity International. The HEI complex has solar power and seismic and hurricane resistance—hallmarks of BHI designs for health care facilities in under-resourced regions. The hospital had survived the quake relatively unscathed, as had the more than 15 BHI projects in the disaster zone, of a total of 60 built in Haiti since 2010.