new arrivals

After nearly three months, we are very happy to report that our last shipment of hospital beds and medical supplies has arrived in Haiti! Our partners at Hôpital Sacré Coeur recently shared the following photos with us:

It is exciting to see these 70 beds in place and even more exciting to know that our efforts are supporting the essential work of our partners at the hospital.

The arrival of these beds at HSC is complemented by a recent expansion of the hospital’s physical plant, which now includes a maintenance building and storage warehouse, situated adjacent to a prosthetic lab and a solar powered water purification system. As our partners at HSC enter their 25th year of improving healthcare in Haiti, we are also happy to report news of an upcoming conversion and expansion of on-site facilities to include a library and a housing compound for additional volunteers and students.

Despite the many media reports focused on the difficulties in creating change in Haiti, we are proud to have worked with an organization that has made the most of opportunities born of the January 2010 earthquake by improving and extending the quality of care available in the north of Haiti. Moreover, as we close the chapter on this project, we are thrilled to recognize that we have successfully accomplished, and surpassed, our initial campaign goal of supporting this organization, by bringing a total of 130 beds to Haiti in the past twelve months.

None of this project could have happened without your support, encouragement, and generosity. We thank you and hope you can share our sense of accomplishment, knowing that our small project to bring hospital beds to Haiti is making a real impact upon Haiti’s healthier future.

updates: many movements!

On the heals of a cholera outbreak that left nearly 450 people dead and more than 6500 hospitalized, Haitians are preparing for the arrival of yet another threatening disaster, Tropical Storm Tomas. Yet not all things headed to Haiti are so ominous! After two months of organizing offers and coordinating partners across the northeast of the US, we are very excited to be updating you from Boston with news that our next donation of beds for Haiti is ready!

Some of us from the 100 Beds team have traveled to help pack up hospital bed frames in Massachusetts. With help from logisticians in Pennsylvania and volunteers from New York, these frames will be matched with mattresses in New Jersey, and then shipped to our partners in the Caribbean on a shipping line from the Mediterranean!

On the eve of our next major shipment of beds to Hôpital Sacré Coeur in Milot, Haiti, we are incredibly grateful for the support and encouragement received from friends and collaborators across the country and around the world. Your financial generosity, and the incredible commitments of volunteers near and far, have made this amazing process possible and it’s really quite moving to see all of these efforts coming together.

It is our hope that everything goes well with our packing and shipping tomorrow, and we look forward to sharing pictures and stories from this next step with you soon. Keep your fingers crossed for us and for our friends and partners in Haiti, with wishes that they weather the upcoming storm, and await our next shipment of beds, with resilience.

35 Beds Headed to Haiti!

While it has been about a month since our last post on this blog, there has been a lot of work going on behind the scenes. Through the generosity of our supporters around the world, 35 hospital beds are headed to Haiti!

Our first shipment of 35 beds will begin its voyage from Germany to Florida this Saturday, May 8, and from there, the beds will make the much shorter journey to Haiti and Hôpital Sacré Coeur. Representing the vision of this campaign, this exciting event was made possible by the collaborative generosity of individuals and organizations, working together from near and far: the donation of 23 beds from the Krankenhaus Bethanien hospital in Moers, Germany and 12 beds from the Klinikum Lüneburg hospital near Hamburg, Germany; the coordination of transportation and packing of the beds by DPD, a world leader in international parcel delivery services; the freight shipping and delivery to Florida by Hellmann Worldwide Logistics; and the tireless commitments and coordination efforts by Marc Maleika in New York, and Philipp Anhalt and Tim Ulrich in Germany, all demonstrate great dedication to helping improve health outcomes in Haiti and have been essential to making this happen.

Krankenhaus Bethanien Hospital in Moers, Germany

We spoke with Philipp Anhalt who gave us a little insight on how he initially got involved in the campaign and how he was able to mobilize his own network of clients and colleagues to send the beds to Haiti.

"About two months ago I received an e-mail from one of my dearest friends announcing the launch of the 100 Beds for Haiti Campaign. Cool idea, I immediately thought, and forwarded it to my friends urging them for support. At the office, I told my colleague Tim who was also immediately excited about the idea. Since our company ITA Consulting located in Hamburg, Germany specializes in the logistics industry, we considered ourselves to be in an ideal position to support charity campaigns and therefore had already spent numerous hours discussing potential approaches to get involved. However, our initial enthusiasm had maliciously been eroded by daily routine and thus our ideas never came even remotely close to life.

So we jumped at the opportunity that the 100 Beds for Haiti Campaign presented us and decided to make a contribution. Thinking about the goal of the campaign to raise 100 hospital beds, we came up with the idea to contact German hospitals and ask whether they would be willing to donate discarded, though functional, beds. From there on the operation was up and running. In no time we managed to acquire 35 beds from various hospitals across Germany, the majority of which were destined for scrapping, and consequently had to be moved quickly. DPD, one of the leading parcel companies in Europe, swiftly agreed to provide straightforward support. They collected the beds and stored them at their Hamburg depot until further notice. We then aimed to find a forwarding company who would ship the beds to Florida. This turned out to be a far more cumbersome task then we expected. Even for such a supposedly simple product like used hospital beds, tons of rules and regulations had to be considered. We finally managed to arrange for the transport via Hellmann Logistics who offered to ship the beds at cost [to Miami, Florida].

DPD loading the donated hospital beds for storage before transportation

Now that the container is on its way, we would like to use the opportunity to express our sincere gratitude to all helping hands. We are particularly grateful for the support of DPD in the Duisburg and Hamburg depots. Also, big thanks to our management for encouraging us to take part in the campaign without further ado and for their active participation!

We thoroughly enjoyed working on this and look forward to the tasks to come..."

The 100 Beds for Haiti Campaign would like to express its sincere gratitude to all the partners involved and to all those who have generously donated to the campaign thus far. Your donations are essential to financing the transportation of these beds and getting them on their way to Milot where they are very much needed!