For this trip, they shipped more than 40,000 pounds of supplies, with the cost of transport covered by a grant from Food for the Poor. Inside the cargo container they put everything from cartons of medication to two desks for the administrators. The small work force is augmented by local LDS missionaries who have volunteered to help unload the materials.

A five-person construction crew that included Gleason and her daughter Charity, Seattle-based musician and construction guru Lars Larson and interpreters/handymen Jonathan Gifford and Chad Lowe flew in a few days early to do heavy construction work such as wiring, plumbing and wall building. The health-care staff would fill in with scraping, painting and cleaning, helped by Haitian volunteers, many of them the children of Haitian board members. A free-lance video photographer and a Deseret News reporter were also invited along.

Tell someone you're going to Haiti for 10 days and you receive one of two responses: Blank stares and a "Why?" Or, "That will be fun. I hear it's beautiful."

The latter misunderstand. They think you're going to Tahiti.

Haiti is a mixture of beauty and horror. The mountainous island is verdant in spots, barren in others. People live in mansions or shanties. The streets are lined with garbage, dumped on the curbs and overrunning the yards. Years of corrupt and ineffective government, coupled with terrible poverty, have destroyed the country's infrastructure. Roads don't get fixed; the garbage truck almost never comes.

Goats and dogs play happily on the heaps, fat and sated. The people are, almost without exception, thin.

Ninety percent of the personal wealth is in the hands of 10 percent of the population, who embrace a lifestyle that would be envied anywhere. The rest work hard at simple survival. About 20 percent have jobs with a regular paycheck, though it might not be much. The rest scramble or rely on organizations like Food for the Poor, which feeds 2,000 families a day. Most do a combination of the two. The average income is less than $350 a year.

There's no tourist industry to speak of anymore. Political turmoil and grime have made this island, now the poorest community in the entire hemisphere and arguably most of the world, an unattractive vacation spot.