Imagine having an unidentifiable illness that no one available to you can recognize. Maybe an illness you’ve never even heard of. Maybe it’s anemia, parasites or hyperextension. Maybe it’s something else, something worse. The only possible way to identify your illness would be to walk for hours, even days to the nearest certified medical lab for a diagnosis. But you know if you attempt the journey, you may never reach the facility at all.

This is the brutal reality for many men, women and children in parts of Haiti.

“That’s why we were so excited when we learned of the Laboratory-in-a-Suitcase,” said Herb Rogers, certified clinical laboratory scientist and licensed medical technologist. Rogers, who works with the American Baptist Churches, served as a missionary in Haiti from 1974 to 2003 and brought an International Aid Lab-in-a-Suitcase when he returned to the country last October.

International Aid’s Lab-in-a-Suitcase is a portable medical lab that is used to diagnose patients accurately and timely, giving patients the greatest chance for survival. Our labs enable health professionals serving in remote areas to perform the majority of standard diagnostics tests most frequently requested by field physicians.

Rogers returned to Haiti with a team of volunteers, a medical doctor, a nurse, several healthcare professionals and a translator. They loaded a dusty, beat-up truck with a Lab-in-a-Suitcase and headed to a remote village in Haiti, 45 miles outside of Port-au-Prince.

“What I liked was the design of the suitcase,” Rogers said. “It’s much more solid, more durable over difficult, rural roads.”

In just two days, they diagnosed and treated over 100 people with chronic diseases that are commonly treated here in the U.S., but without proper treatment can quickly lead to death for the people of Haiti.

“One of the great values of the Lab-in-a-Suitcase is you have the capacity to confirm or exclude a diagnoses for a number of diseases in a very short order,” he said. “With the Lab-in-a-Suitcase, you can almost immediately diagnose a number of diseases. By having this ability in the field, we are able to easily and affordably bring relief to the patients.”