25395: Wharram - news - Small items filling big needs (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

> From Bruce Wharram <bruce.wharram@sev.org>

 The Herald-Press



MIKE PERKINS: Small items filling big needs

Where you and I see a small slab of soap or a tiny bottle of shampoo,
souvenirs from a stay at some faraway motel, Tom Karns sees hope.

Where you and I see scraps of cotton flannel from a discarded both of cloth,
Wanda Karns sees comfort.

These modest commodities fill great needs in a poverty-choked nation like
Haiti. The Karnses, working from their home near the Huntington University
campus, have dedicated much of their talents and energy to seeing that these
needs are met.

On Friday, Karns was filling boxes with motel soaps and toiletry miniatures
donated by local churches and service clubs. He'll take them to the Ossian
pharmacy run by Bob Honegger, whose Bluffton-based Apostolic Christian
Church will see that the boxes are shipped to Haiti and make their was to
Grace Children's Hospital, in Port-Au-Prince, the capital of the island
nation.

The soaps and shampoos will be used when the children shower - two to three
times a day, Tom said, to prevent cross-contamination in the open wards
where they are kept.

Outside of the hospital, the children are able to bathe, he added, "only
when it rains."

The Karnses have collected items for the hospital for years. It perpetuates
a mission begun in the mid-1970s by his daughter, Marianne, who went to
Haiti on a missions trip while in high school and made a strong connection
with the need she saw there. Marianne Karns died in an accident in 1976, and
her parents have carried on the work she felt so strongly about.

"This is our part," Karns said as he separated the soaps, shampoos, and
mouthwashes in his dining room. "It doesn't cost us anything to get it and
it doesn't cost us anything to ship it."

It takes time to organize it, though, and the Karnses are always willing to
donate that. Tom talks "to anybody who'll listen" about Grace Children's
Hospital, which treats children suffering from tuberculosis and inoculates
youngsters for TB, smallpox, measles and a host of other diseases that still
torment Haiti. Through her women's group at Trinity United Methodist Church,
Wanda has organized sewing projects that have made everything for the gowns
and diapers worn by the patients to outfits the children receive - along
with a pair of shoes - when they're admitted.

"Time was when it was not unusual for a kids to show up at the hospital
naked," Tom recalls. "It was priorities. Thirty-five cents will buy you a
bowl and rice and beans. Thirty-five cents will buy you a T-shirt. If a
child starves to death, they didn't need a T-shirt."

The Karnses have visited the hospital four times since 1979, the last time
in 2001. Vaccinations and improvements in medical care mean fewer of the
hospital's 50 beds are occupied these days. (Mattresses for those beds,
incidentally, were donated by one of the Karnses' projects.) The mortality
rate of the young patients has been steady for some time at around 8 percent
despite the fact that, as Tom said, "These children are admitted only if
they're dying."

Grace Children's Hospital opened in the late 1960s after a Monticello
couple, the late Jim and Virginia Snavely, witnessed Port-Au-Prince's public
health nightmare as tourists and returned to help. They bought the former
home of the Mexican ambassador to Haiti and created a hospital which has
also been a training center for Haitian health care workers.

Patient turnover is high. Most youngsters are dismissed after 11 days, with
instructions to return for testing and medication adjustments once a month.
Because each young patient takes the hospital-issued clothing home with
them, the need for gowns and diapers, in particular, is constant.

"Since we've become involved with it we calculate that between 5 1/2 and 6
1/2 million children have gone though the hospital, for either treatment or
immunization," Tom declared. Part of the memorial money contributed after
their daughter's death helped established the outpatient clinic, which
treats 200 children a day, five days a week.

A shipment of toiletries goes out next week, but the need is constant, and
the Karnses say donations for future shipments can be dropped off at the
Trinity church office at Guilford and East Market streets.

"We're stunned at how people have react to the story we tell," Tom said. "If
we've ever been guided to do anything, it has been Grace Children's
Hospital."

Mike Perkins is editor of The Herald-Press