Yes, I have the power of C2C’s new generator. A few months ago, Grace Children’s hospital started having trouble with the facilities behemoth generator; as a result, operations in the C2C clinic were stressed: no AC, and as power came in and out so too came our ability to run lab tests.

Energy and electricity are vital for development.  In Haiti, consistent electricity is a luxury. The city of Port-au-Prince can’t meet its constituents’ energy demands, so we often have blackouts. As such, power inverters and generators are a big business here and their prices are quite high. But when you’re running a health facility, you assume those costs because the ends justifies the means.

The C2C laboratory was suffering enormously from the erratic electricity. Imagine a patient who comes to the lab for a test, the lab tech does the blood drawn and starts the test on the centrifuge machine or the thermo spectronic  and zap! the power shut down. Then the blood sample is no good anymore and the patient who’ll come for her result the day after will be surprised to know that she will be subjected to a new blood draw instead. This wasteful scenario happened a few times recently, and as it became clear that GCH was not close to a solution for the hospital power, I took matters into my own hands.

Now, I have the power.  You can’t imagine how I feel as facility manager every time a patient is getting angry at the lab tech and then the lab tech turns her look at me as to say: “You see what you’ve done”. Now, we are all happy, and the biggest happiness will come from the patients when they get their lab test results on time and when they won’t need to be subject to multiple blood draws.

Yes, I have the power to continue providing high quality health care to so many women in need.