Health Center

La sante se lespwa, lespwa se tout bagay.
(Health is hope; hope is everything.)
--motto of Leopold Florent Bourgouin, MD.

“I have found my heart,” Leopold Florent Bourgouin, MD, said in 2005, when ServeHAITI opened the new health center in Grand-Bois.

It was far from Dr. Leo’s first trip to the impoverished region. That was in 2001 when, at the age of 29, he staffed ServeHAITI’s original clinic at the parish church in St. Pierre.

At first, Dr. Leo worked at the clinic 15 days per month, 10 months of the year, as the road from Port-au-Prince to Grand-Bois is too muddy to travel during the rainy season. Since 2006, Dr. Leo has lived at the clinic where he serves as full-time medical director.

To see him, patients travel many miles—often on foot or by wooden-saddled mule. And he provides much more than medical services. When not attending patients, the soft-spoken Dr. Leo teaches at the local high school and serves as a community leader.

Leopold Florent Bourgouin was born in 1971 in Bainet, Haiti. His father still lives there; his mother has passed away.

Dr. Leo received his doctor of medicine degree from the University of Haiti in 1996. He undertook additional studies at the University of Montreal and earned a degree in community medicine from the Haitian Institute of Community Health. In 1999 he was certified as a specialist in preventative, community, and social medicine by the University of Haiti.

When he first began working with ServeHAITI, Dr. Leo told us, “It’s hard to make a difference in Haiti.”

It is hard. But Dr. Leo is making a very big difference in Haiti.