First in a series

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — They come to receive American medicine, rising in the dark to greet the bus that picked them up in the saddest section of this all-too-sad city at 6 a.m. They are mostly silent as they ride along the bumpy roads, some apprehensive, others almost giddy with anticipation.

Women cradle babies who have misshapen arms and children with lumps on their spines that fill them with an unspoken dread. Elderly women, barely able to walk, cling to the arms of their adult daughters as they climb haltingly from the bus to go through the white gate. Men without legs lean on makeshift canes and crutches. A few lucky ones have wheelchairs. Others sit in clunky carts or ride piggyback on stronger kin.

In the yard of the clinic, open for the first time that very day, they bow their heads and raise their hands and voices in prayer.

In this country, faced with dire need for food, for potable water, for jobs and medicine, they pray not for themselves, but for those they have come to see.

They pray for what they hope will be healing hands.

Dr. Jeff Randle can talk to you about dreams. His own formed when he served a mission to Haiti for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the early 1980s.

He fell in love with a people who were starved for many things. For a just government, for food, for jobs. But the hungriest of all were those with disabilities. They were not part of their society, most either ignored or actively shunned. Some of the luckier ones were protected by doting mothers. Others were simply abandoned at orphanages. Two decades later, a humanitarian-aid director would call them the "living dead."

Children were being born with cerebral palsy at abnormally high rates. Simple infections, allowed to fester without adequate care, often ended in amputation. Injuries from car wrecks, strokes, illnesses — so treatable in other countries — became lifelong disabilities.

Rehabilitation simply has not existed for this island community, where someone who reaches 50 has attained a ripe, old age.

Randle decided he'd go to medical school and become a rehabilitation doctor. He swore he'd find a way to help Haitians fight disabilities.

One day, he thought, he'd return — perhaps with a wife — to offer care a month or so a year.

Years later, established in LDS Hospital, he told social worker Susan Gleason about his dream.

Gleason told him it was too small.

When Healing Hands for Haiti, conceived from Randle's dream and birthed in the rehab unit at LDS Hospital before expanding to include volunteers from health facilities across the Wasatch Front, made its first trip to Haiti three years ago, it received a mixed welcome.