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.

Gleason coordinated many of the details, contacting by phone a woman in Haiti who worked for a children's hospital and foundation. Gina Duncan was excited that Americans wanted to hold a rehabilitation clinic where she worked. She arranged inexpensive room and board — the Healing Hands volunteers pay their expenses themselves — but hit a snag. Her foundation withdrew support, uneasy because Randle was an LDS Church member. Duncan was told LDS Church members were satanic. She cared only about their medical qualifications and the fact that they were willing, at their own expense, to provide care for Haitians who desperately needed it. She quit her job and started volunteering, from Haiti, for the organization, while also working at a nursing home.

As Healing Hands for Haiti began to raise money, it hired her as its in-Haiti coordinator.

The organization started making trips two or three times a year to Haiti, using some seasoned and some new volunteers each time. They held clinics in the St. Vincent School, run by the Episcopal Church. They visited orphanages. They provided rehabilitation care, artificial limbs, physical therapy, medicine and practical suggestions, along with braces and wheelchairs and splints, to anyone who came. They were unique among the charitable health-care organizations in Haiti, completely uninterested in a person's religion and totally dedicated to rehabilitative care, which simply didn't exist.

The July 2000 trip would be different, though. On this trip, volunteers would split time between providing care in orphanages and makeshift clinics and doing manual labor.

The group had raised enough to establish its own clinic, in a beautiful but timeworn house on a quiet street in the city's heart. Thousands of dollars would go into painting and equipping the $1,500-a-month building, a large and elegant facility compared to the quarters in which they'd toiled previously.

The building is different things to different people. For the physical therapists, it's a wonderful work area to store supplies and use the equipment they haven't been able to haul around with them. There are exercise machines, weights, a set of portable stairs — all tools of recovery.

For Randle, it's the next step in an enhanced dream.

Eventually, it will be both clinic and school, a place where locals can be trained in rehabilitation medicine. They will learn to heal their families, their neighbors, their community. American doctors will show them how, but they'll be the ones to provide year-round care, instead of sporadic clinics.