Dr. Waldo Dagan was attending church a week before the January earthquake in Haiti when Marilyn Monaghan told him about an upcoming mission trip to support her daughter and son-in-law’s work to raise employment in the impoverished Caribbean country.

“I knew in my heart I had to do something to help,” Dagan said. “The earthquake made it even more relevant.”

Dagan, an internist, was in the process of getting his own primary care clinic off the ground. He opened Sumner’s Cornerstone Medical Clinic in February and, almost three months later, after the Daffodil Parade he invited the public to an open house and silent art auction to support the ApParent Project.

The ApParent Project was the result of Corrigan and Shelley Clay’s attempt to adopt. Realizing that black males were the most under-adopted children, they looked to Haiti and worked at an orphanage in the country to understand the culture while they felt out the adoption process.

“What we found out was that most of the children in Haitian orphanages still had living parents,” said Corrigan Clay, who attended Dagan’s open house during a brief leave from Haiti. “They were parents who had the choice of starving together or giving at least one of them a chance.

“Now we ask parents at the door, ‘Would you keep your child if you had a job?’ We’ve only had one parent say no.”

The nonprofit was formed to educate Americans about the extreme poverty in Haiti and help improve the situation. The Clays spend most of their time near Port-au-Prince, supporting themselves and their aid work on Corrigan Clay’s job as a high school teacher. They were in their home on the island when the earthquake hit.

“I was on the 31st floor of the Bank of America building in Seattle during the 2001 earthquake,” Clay said. “That felt like being on a leaf fan going up and down. This was violent. Everything in the kitchen immediately went on the floor. We got under a doorframe, but we could see the perimeter wall around our property shaking like Jell-O.”

In the immediate aftermath, they found themselves performing tasks far out of their mission scope, such as setting broken bones with a broken chair leg as an improvised splint. Educating the U.S. about Haiti also took a sudden backseat, as the entire world’s attention had gone to the island overnight. But the overall mission hasn’t changed, Clay said.

Rather than expend resources on direct aid, ApParent seeks to introduce cashflow into the local economy by employing jobless Haitians in artisan work, primarily jewelry-craft. Many of the participating Haitians make necklaces and bracelets out of recycled materials for sale in the States. Half the proceeds go directly into the craftsman’s pocket, the other half is reinvested into operating funds for ApParent’s central mission and lonterm projects such as a school.

It is the school that Dagan was interested in helping to fund.

Dagan put up a series of his own artwork for bid in a silent auction open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. The doctor usually works with acrylic and water color paints, he said, but this series – which he called “Patina” – was the result of his foray into mixed media, assembling materials such as wood board, metal plates and barbed wire into works of art.

“I chose aging materials so that I could make a commentary about aging in people,” Dagan said. “Medicine has the ability to help people in aging, but it is limited. We all age, but there is beauty in aging.”

In addition to helping ApParent, the art show also served a dual purpose of further introducing Dagan’s medical clinic to Sumner. He held the main luncheon after the Daffodil Parade to bring in curious foot traffic.

Dagan opened Corner-stone to address a lack of primary care in Sumner and to provide a walking distance clinic with a small town feel, he said.

He currently operates the medical side of his business alone, but he is equipped with six exam rooms which he hopes to staff with more physicians as he expands, he said.

Dagan opened the luncheon with a few words, thanks and an introduction to ApParent from Corrigan. Just before serving food, Dagan led a prayer that ended with him trying to hold back tears.

“Thank you, God, for everything that you have given to us,” he said. “And for bringing all of us here to help those in need today.”