Famous Haiti Hospital Clings to Life : Caribbean: The charity Albert Schweitzer medical center is staffed mostly by foreign workers. They treat everything from AIDS to malaria.

“Reverence for life,” the philosophy of renowned humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, is carved in stone at the entrance to a hospital in central Haiti that bears his name.

Staff members still have their reverence for life, but preserving it has rarely been more difficult in the hospital’s 38-year history.

Nearly three years of military rule and economic sanctions have drastically worsened suffering in what was already the poorest nation of the Americas.

“Almost every day, we see somebody walking by here carrying a casket,” said Sharon Arbaugh, a Mennonite missionary who volunteers at Albert Schweitzer Hospital.

Economic hardship has torn many families apart and made survival a challenge for those who stay together. The contrast between two babies at the hospital, one Haitian and one American, provided a stunning illustration.

Waiting on a bench for treatment was Obene Normil, age 1, weight 11 pounds. Malnutrition had turned his dark hair red. Doctors said it might be 18 months before his spindly legs could support his body.

Arbaugh, working in the ward, carried along her own 8-month-old son, Jonathan, a robust 22 pounds.

“When I walk through this ward, I feel like crying,” she said. “If I hear the children crying, I want to just go and pick them up.”

The latest international sanction, a ban on air service, poses even more problems for the hospital, preventing the arrival of volunteers and disrupting shipments of medical supplies.

Dr. Marlene Goodfriend, a child psychiatrist from Rockford, Ill., was on one of the last commercial flights. The next day, she saved the life of a 6-year-old boy who was brought in unconscious with a 104-degree fever.

That patient was reason enough for Dr. Goodfriend to put her practice on hold for at least six weeks and stay at Albert Schweitzer, which serves 185,000 people in more than 600 square miles of the Artibonite Valley.

“Here, I am needed,” she said. “There, they can always go down the hall to another doctor.”

Full-timers at Albert Schweitzer don’t even make five-figure salaries, much less the six figures they are accustomed to in the United States, said Tim Dutton, the administrator. Dutton, 42, gave up running a hospital in Shelby, Ohio, to bring his family, including daughters aged 6 and 8, to Haiti two years ago.

“We didn’t think that the normal life in the United States of career changes and stepping up the ladder was satisfying,” he said. “There was an element of us needing . . . to make a difference. For our daughters, we wanted them to see that the world was a bigger place, and there were problems and pains.”

Hospital workers acquire Haitian resilience and seem confident that they will not only endure, but prevail.

“You learn patience, tolerance, that your way of running the world is not always right and that there are other ways too,” said nursing director Debbie Berquist, who arrived 5 1/2 years ago from Hamilton, Ontario.

“Haiti’s gone through many cycles of instability, president after president, coup after coup. But the hospital goes on.”

Nurses deliver babies. Doctors deal with AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhea, typhoid and hepatitis, handling more pathology in two weeks than they do in years in the States.

The idea for the hospital came to William Larimer Mellon Jr., an oil and banking heir, in 1947 when he read about the hospital started by Schweitzer in the poor African nation of Gabon.

“From that moment on, our life changed,” recalled his widow, Gwen Grant Mellon, 83.

Mellon, who was in his 40s, quit ranching in Arizona, enrolled at Tulane Medical School in New Orleans and started corresponding with Schweitzer about starting his own Third World clinic. Schweitzer’s facility, begun in a chicken coop, had evolved into a large hospital treating thousands of people a year.

Mellon chose Haiti, and when asked why, would respond: “Because Haiti is our neighbor.”

Mellon managed the hospital until his death five years ago. Gwen Mellon runs it now from a wooden table in the courtyard. The money comes from family trusts and donations. Hundreds of foreign doctors who have served at the hospital are among the contributors.

Haitians pay the equivalent of about $1 for a visit, lab work and medicines, and about twice that for an overnight stay.

Seeing people who walk all day or come by donkey to get treatment for themselves or their children, it doesn’t take long to want to help, said Dr. Gretchen Berggren, 61, a lecturer at Harvard who has worked at the hospital off and on since 1967. She was one of six health care workers honored by the White House in December.

“We are all inspired by the strength of the Haitian people,” Berggren said.