Crowdfunded Healthcare Is Saving Lives in the World’s Poorest Countries

April 11, 2017, 6:00pm

On the flight to Haiti I sit with a guidebook and read about raucous street music, voodoo ceremony etiquette, and the beauty of rice and beans. On the flight home I’ll scroll through a spreadsheet of dead children: “The patients who died before surgery are in tab 6,” the email will say. Six days is a long time in Haiti.

I land in the capital, Port-au-Prince, at lunchtime on Friday and take a taxi to St Damien Hospital, where I meet Owen Robinson. In an examination room, he introduces me to Michael Crapanzano, who’s examining a girl with kidney cancer and a huge swollen abdomen.

Michael is a pediatric cardiologist who lives in Baton Rouge but regularly comes to Haiti to do echocardiograms—ultrasound scans of the heart—for Haiti Cardiac Alliance, a nonprofit organization co-founded by Owen in 2013.

Owen is 36 years old and lives in Vermont. He used to work for the Clinton Health Access Initiative and Partners in Health, a nonprofit health organization. Owen has a degree in political science and government, and a Master’s in international security policy—both from Harvard.

About a dozen American cardiologists volunteer for Owen. They come for a few days and see dozens of patients, mostly children. If a patient needs surgery, Owen arranges to fly them to a place where it can happen—usually Health City Cayman Islands on Grand Cayman, where surgeons operate on children for free. Some go to the US.