Quinton Friesan and Linda Baulsir came together to raise funds -- and Teddy bears -- for a Nigerian hospital.

Photo Credit: Teresa Semmunegus

Quinton, with friends from Bingham University Hospital in Nigeria.

Photo Credit: contributed

The 40-foot container that traveled from Connecticut to Nigeria

Photo Credit: contributed

Teddy bears await passage in the container en route to Nigeria.

Photo Credit: contributed

Quinton Friesen is not a man who gives up easily. If he were, a hospital in Nigeria might not have benefited from the generosity of his church-members, the Greenwich Rotarians, the children of Temple B'nai Chaim and Quinton himself.

"I had met a gentleman named Peter Fretheim through my church who'd moved to Nigeria with his wife some years earlier," says Quinton, a longtime Greenwich resident. "Our church had supported his mission work and he invited members of the congregation to visit in 2003."

For Quinton, who is Greenwich Hospital's executive vice president and chief operating officer, the visit to Bingham University Teaching Hospital in Jos, Nigeria, was enlightening. "It's a large city of about 600,000 people and the conditions there are difficult," he says. The hospital, where he ran a seminar in healthcare leadership, was sorely lacking in medical equipment and supplies.

After returning home from another visit to Jos in 2007, he decided to take action. "It occurred to me that I wanted to find something to do – something to leave behind that would last longer than our visit," he said. "I thought, 'wouldn't it be great to organize a shipment container of medical equipment and 
supplies to send to the hospital?'"

It didn't sound like such a tall order, but in fact organizing, shipping and clearing customs for a 40-foot sea container filled with medical supplies proved time-consuming and daunting. (The container and critical shipping coordination was provided by IMEC, a nonprofit organization that provides medical equipment to doctors and nurses in hospitals and clinics in impoverished areas worldwide.)

Quinton called in the proverbial cavalry in the form of the Greenwich Rotary Club. There he befriended Linda Baulsir, chair of the International Projects Committee for the Rotary, who helped him raise $30,000 for his Nigerian project in only a matter of days. Linda's involvement in the project gave it a new leveraging twist. She mentioned the project to her grandson, David, who was planning the social action piece of his upcoming Bar Mitzvah. Together, they looked online at photos of the children in the Nigerian hospital. The images compelled her grandson "to suggest that [the children's] hospital experience would be made easier if they had Teddy bears to cuddle." David collected more than 100 new Teddy bears from children at Temple B'nai Chaim. And when Linda told her fellow Rotarians about the project, they donated another 200 Teddy bears to be added the shipment. Linda and her husband then "drove the bears to the IMEC warehouse, where they were included in the medical equipment shipment and inventoried as 'play therapy.'"

But the successful fundraising didn't aid Quinton's plight of actually getting the container's contents (which, in addition to Teddy bears, included medical suites of equipment, essential contents of examination rooms, nurseries, etc.) to the hospital. After finally making the trip abroad, it had been held at Nigerian customs due to red tape. And it remained there for the better part of a year.

Finally, after seven years in the making and the positive intervention of countless individuals, the container arrived at the hospital in 2009. "Fortunately," says Quinton, "Within weeks of its delivery, there was civil unrest in the city and state wherein hundreds of people were injured and died." The medical supplies, he says, quite possibly saved the lives of many others.

"We were so excited when the container finally arrived," he says. "There was so much reciprocal kindness and providential care. I can only hope that such actions stimulate others to reach out and help others," he adds.