Jim Ansara, a sturdy, 52-year-old former electrician from Boston, made his way to the devastated main hospital in the Haitian capital four days after the earthquake and went to work amid piles of lifeless bodies.
He found small generators and got them working. He spliced wires to light the makeshift operating rooms. He helped move patients around. For 12 days, working with Americans and Haitians, doctors and nurses, and hospital maintenance workers, he helped bring some order to the turmoil.
It’s a safe bet that none of the Haitians packed into the wrecked hospital complex had a clue that Ansara is a multimillionaire construction magnate who, with his wife, Karen, pledged $1 million from their personal fortune to help Haitians recover, and that while Jim was reviving generators in Port-au-Prince, Karen was back in Boston pumping donors to match their gift.
Ansara, who built one of the nation’s largest construction companies from scratch, and his wife, who spent years expanding the horizons of Boston fund-raising, have become powerful forces in Haiti’s recovery and rebuilding.
“Jim was saving lives on the ground and Karen was making sure we connected with the Haitian-American community here and getting the fund up and running,’’ said Kate Guedj, vice president for philanthropic services at the Boston Foundation who has worked with the Ansaras for a decade. “They are just incredibly genuine and incredibly engaged.’’
In an interview shortly after arriving home, Ansara recalled arriving to the sight of more than 1,000 bodies clogging the hospital grounds. He said he couldn’t persuade some maintenance workers to go to the main generator at first because so many corpses lay in the path, awash in blood and body fluids.
Ansara did whatever was helpful. He helped set up a big cistern of drinking water for patients and staff, and took injured patients on a bed frame for treatment. It took another four days, but Ansara and other volunteers finally got the long-idled main generator repaired. They also wired in the temporary operating room, providing steady light to doctors and nurses who had operated with headlamps.
“If it weren’t for Jim’s involvement, we would not have accomplished what we did on the ground in the last two weeks,’’ said Dr. David Walton, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who arrived in Haiti just after the quake and worked side-by-side with Ansara. “He was so hands-on that he was taking things apart, and putting them back together.’’
Meanwhile, from their home in Essex north of Boston, Karen went to work the day after the Jan. 12 quake, creating a Haiti relief and development fund through the Boston Foundation. The Ansaras put up $1 million to match public gifts to the new Haiti recovery fund, with the goal of collecting $2 million in all. But they didn’t want simply to buy food and blankets; they wanted to engage Haitian groups in the Boston area and let them take the lead on putting that money to the best use as Haiti rebuilds.
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