FARMINGTON — Dr. Bob Chagrasulis takes great pride in the relief work that he has done with Rotary work groups in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

“Rotary down there opens a lot of doors,” he said at the Farmington Rotary’s June 11 meeting. “They know we have no personal agenda. We’re just there to help.”

In his introduction of Chagrasulis, who was a guest speaker, Rotary member Bill Marceau noted that he has a chemical engineering degree from Northeastern University, a degree from the University of Southern Alabama Medical School, and had a fellowship at Vanderbilt. He is a charter member of the Lake Region Rotary and a charter member of the Calais Rotary.

“The medical teams I go down with are principally funded by different churches,” Chagrasulis said. “The reason I do this is so many churches are involved in this kind of work.”

For the past 25 years, he has helped with general medical clinics on sugar plantations in the eastern Dominican Republic. Sugar cane cutters work there in squalid conditions.

“It used to be slaves brought over to cut,” said Chagrasulis. “Now, they’re primarily contract workers.”

Currently, the Dominican Republic’s economy is mostly tourism “but there’s still sugar,” he said.

About 25 years ago, “there was a need for these Haitian workers to be taken care of, so we started building a hospital,” said Chagrasulis. “It’s amazingly modern and it’s not just for Haitian people.”

They also do mobile medical clinics. “I also go to the prisons and we’ll see 1,000 patients in four days,” said Chagrasulis.

Another project he worked on was putting a water filtration system in a hospital. Meanwhile, he worked on the sugarcane plantations and saw a lot of diseases related to bad water.

Thus, water sanitation and hygiene became an area of focus for Chagrasulis. He showed examples of a water filter, that was used, and described how the water could be filtered down through sand, which would take out the bad particles and result in clean water.

Rotary District 7810 provided a clean water work team for the poverty-stricken country. Chagrasulis mentioned that he had written grants to help do the work. People from all professions were part of the Rotary team helping dig ditches for garbage dumps, and performing sanitation and hygiene work.

“We have changed our focus,” Chagrasulis added. “We’re still doing water filters. We’ll be doing adult literacy and working with women’s health issues.”

One of the lessons they’ve taught is getting children to wash their hands in school, and work teams have built hand washing facilities to aid in this.

Children have also embraced learning how to write. When asked why they want to do so, their response, according to Chagrasulis, is “I want to learn how to write my name.”

“The women have lots of babies. That seems to be their lot in life, and their husbands cut the sugar cane,” he said. However, he noted that the women can cook and sew and have many talents.

The clinic that Chagrasulis helped develop has HIV testing. “HIV is a big health problem down there,” he said. Thanks to money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, drugs can now be obtained in the Dominican Republic to combat the disease.

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