Delivering Hope in Haiti

In 1947, William Larimer Mellon, Jr., heir to the Mellon oil and banking fortune, read an article in Life magazine about a hospital in Africa founded by Albert Schweitzer. It changed his life.

Then 37, Mr. Mellon, a cattle rancher, sold his Arizona property, enrolled in medical school, and, less than 10 years later, opened his own hospital serving the poor in a mountainous region of Haiti.

The 108-bed Hopital Albert Schweitzer, which costs $3-million a year to run, serves some 225,000 residents who live in the 610 square miles surrounding the Artibonite Valley. The hospital is financed through the Grant Foundation, a Sarasota, Fla., charity that Dr. Mellon established to raise money for the facility.

Although Dr. Mellon died in 1989, his widow, Gwendolyn, remains in Haiti, overseeing the hospital’s operations.

Over the last half-century, the hospital’s mission and services have expanded beyond the building’s boundaries to accommodate the growing needs of the area’s residents. An effort to establish wells in various neighborhoods expanded into a full-blown community-development program, with veterinary services for residents’ livestock and a gardening project.

The hospital has also started a loan program to help women establish bank accounts and small businesses. More than 600 women participate in the program.

Thousands of children are treated for malnutrition at the facility. But the hospital has done much to improve the health of children, including eliminating infantile tetanus, which was once the No. 1 cause of death among infants.