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A Pueblo group will soon drastically expand the medical services available in Haiti's second-largest city.

A three-year grant from Catholic Health Initiatives, which owns St. Mary-Corwin Medical Center, will send Dr. James Smith and a large surgical team to Gonaives, Haiti, in February. There, the group will stay 12 days to perform surgeries and teach Haitian doctors how to use the American equipment donated by the Catholic Initiatives group.

The effort is an expansion of the regular yearly medical missions to Haiti run by the Ascension Episcopal Church and St. Mary-Corwin. For the past eight years, groups of medical professionals and helpers have traveled to Gonaives to provide a week of medical services for an area that sorely needs them.

Smith said that while Gonaives has 300,000 people, it doesn't have a lot of health care.

Past missions have offered only clinical medical care and medications. While there, Smith said he and the group saw a huge need for surgery services.

"This is the second largest city in Haiti," he said. "They have one hospital, and that just barely functions."

The hospital has three operating rooms, but only one of them is usable, Smith said. And it can only be used for emergencies, like appendectomies and Caesarean-section births.

So Smith's 20-member group is taking surgical gear like anesthesia equipment, lathroscopic surgery equipment and ventilators. One 40-foot container of equipment has already been moved to the hospital this past spring.

Smith hopes to set up and equip two operating rooms during the group's 12-day stay.

"I'm going to try to run two operating rooms for five days, for eight to 10 hours a day," he said. "That's probably 30 to 50 surgeries. And we're going to leave the equipment there so they can keep the two surgery rooms going."

The group, mostly Pueblo-area medical professionals, will include anesthesiologists and others needed to do the surgeries, as well as a dentist.

"That is something they really need," Smith said.

The grant will pay for more than just the visit, Smith said. It also will pay to build a clinic in Gonaives and staff it with a Haitian doctor and nurse.

And, eventually, Smith said he'd like to expand the program to include training Haitian doctors and nurses here in Pueblo and making the Haitian hospital a teaching hospital, complete with paid residencies for Haitian doctors.

A teaching program at the hospital would provide more types of medical services for the Haitian people he said, and improve the quality of the services too.

Smith has gone on the Haitian missions for the past six years through his involvement with the Episcopal church. The mission has had to be suspended a few times because conditions weren't safe in Haiti, but Smith said it's OK this year.

"It's fine, it's safe, as long as you don't go to the actual slums of Port-au-Prince," he said. "That's where all the kidnappings have been going on."

The group is hosted by a sister church in Haiti, St. Basil Episcopal Church. Smith said the local congregation members put the medical group members up in their homes, drive them around and help keep them out of trouble areas.

Group members are all volunteers and many pay their own air fare for the trips.

Smith said he plans to continue volunteering for the mission for some time to come.

"I'm told it's the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere," he said. "They have a tremendous need. They are so grateful that someone from America even thinks enough to show up and do anything for them.

"It's very rewarding to go down there and do whatever you can do."