Even before arriving in Nashville, Tenn., even before learning of plans to build a desperately needed clinic and hospital in the small coastal town of Petite Riviere de Nippes in southern Haiti, Sr. Mary Kay Tyrell, DC, had a special bond with the people of that impoverished Caribbean nation.

Sr. Tyrell, senior vice president for mission integration with Saint Thomas Health Services in Nashville, and her Chicago community, had shared their home with four Haitian nuns - women who had come to the Windy City so that one of the sisters could undergo urgently needed medical care.

And while Sr. Tyrell and her fellow Chicago sisters spoke no Creole and the Haitian sisters spoke no English, bit by bit the women managed to exchange intimate details of their lives.

"Living with them was a wonderful thing," she said. "We got to know what they had been through - some of the horrors, some of the joys. And so, when I heard the plans for the clinic and the hospital, it was something very personal for me."

Five years have passed since Sr. Tyrell first learned of the Nashville-based Visitation Hospital Foundation's dream to build first a clinic, and then a hospital, in the rural Haitian community. Three years ago, she joined the foundation's board to help make the dream a reality.

"I knew from the beginning that the Visitation Hospital Foundation was a gathering of people who were very serious about what they were doing," she said of Nashville-area leaders who have worked on the project for more than a decade. "These were not just people who were going to start something and never finish it."

Theresa Patterson organized the Visitation Hospital Foundation and has been the driving force behind the project. She directs the Parish Twinning Program of the Americas, a program that matches U.S. and Canadian churches with churches in Haiti. Her job has taken her to Haiti more than 80 times so she is intimately familiar with the paucity of health care resources in the impoverished nation.

In 1996, Patterson jotted a message to herself in her phone book: build a hospital in Haiti.

In the beginning, as the idea for a clinic and hospital began to take hold in her mind, she said, "I had no earthly idea how it was going to happen. But so many things began to fall into place that I was convinced it was the Holy Spirit at work."

Patterson called the relationship with Sr. Tyrell, the Daughters of Charity, and Saint Thomas "extremely valuable." The hospital has offered its resources for publicity and media work. It gave the foundation a $10,000 grant for a water purification project for the clinic.

Sr. Tyrell said Saint Thomas has a long history of supporting medical mission work and she expects physicians and other medical personnel will donate their time and skills to the Petite Riviere de Nippes hospital project.

In January, led by a teenage boy carrying a crucifix, residents of Petite Riviere de Nippes paraded from St. Antoine Church to the new Visitation Clinic, to celebrate its opening.

Staff at the clinic - which cost some $550,000 to build - saw 97 patients the first day, Patterson said. It is not uncommon, she said, for medical personnel to treat up to 150 people in a single day.

Patterson hopes that construction of the hospital and an ambulatory surgery center can begin in the next two years. Current plans call for a 75-bed inpatient facility, complete with surgical suites, an intensive care unit, a chapel and a nursery. Cost of the hospital is roughly estimated at about $1.5 million.

The foundation is expanding its campaign to ensure it raises the needed capital. Patterson said while much of the fund-raising efforts of the foundation have taken place in Tennessee, a recent event was held in Indianapolis.

Alan Dooley, a Nashville architect who has been involved in the project since 1999, said the nearest hospital to Petite Riviere de Nippes now is three to seven hours away, depending on travel conditions.

"People will die in that amount of time," he said.