Last weekend there were stories on earthquake-ravaged Haiti about the urgent need for medical supplies.

It was a need that Hand in Hand Ministries, together with its medical partner Supplies Over Seas (SOS), recognized in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 12 temblor that devastated the Caribbean Island nation.

Hand in Hand and SOS, which was founded in 1994 by the Greater Louisville Medical Society Foundation, established a partnership in 2008 to collect and send unused and surplus medical supplies to poor nations and people who need them.

Wayne Fowler, Hand in Hand’s executive director, said his organization and SOS have already sent to Haiti about 500 pounds of medical supplies conservatively valued at about $30,000.

Now they are preparing to send a 40-foot by 40-foot ocean-going shipping container filled with supplies. That container will hold 8,000 pounds of supplies worth about $100,000 — and that, too, is a conservative estimate, said Allen Montgomery, director of Supplies Over Seas.

“We’re sending skin preparation packages, dressings, sutures, orthopedic materials, durable goods such as crutches — just lots and lots of medical items,” he said. “They have an urgent need for supplies, and one of the key challenges in all of this is to make sure that you’re appropriately matching the supplies you have with their specific needs.”

Hand in Hand and SOS have obtained sponsorship to cover the shipping cost of the first container, which was to be loaded yesterday, Feb. 3. That $12,500 expense is being met by Baptist Healthcare System. A second shipping container filled with supplies will be sponsored by Jewish Hospital & St. Mary’s HealthCare and by the Jewish Hospital & St. Mary’s HealthCare medical staff.

A great deal of effort — coordinating volunteers, sorting and packaging, among other things — goes into getting medical supplies from Louisville to places such as Haiti. Within the first few days following the earthquake, the calls for help went out, and SOS’s Montgomery said more than 375 people have volunteered to help. That’s just since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Jan. 18, he noted.

Montgomery, who admitted to being dead tired during a telephone conversation last week, said the outpouring of both donated supplies and individual hours of work has been remarkable.

“People are being remarkably generous with their time and their effort,” he said. “They recognize that the people in Haiti really need what we’re sending to them, and the sooner they get it, the sooner it can be put to use helping them.”

The container that was loaded yesterday will be carried by a semi-tractor to a port on the East Coast, then ferried by ship directly to Haiti, Montgomery said.

“We had numerous options when it came to transporting the supplies, and what we wanted to do was work with a trusted and reliable partner,” he explained.

That partner for the first container will be Food for the Poor, which has had “an extensive presence on the ground in Haiti for years,” Montgomery said.

“We’re in conversation with numerous potential sending partners for the second container,” he added.

Hand in Hand’s Fowler, who visited Haiti in 1998 and 2001, noted that even before this latest disaster, the nation was in dire straits.

“When I was there, everywhere you look you’d see people walking with those five-gallon plastic jugs looking for water,” he said. “You’d see people washing their clothes in the river. People told me that when I visited, I’d see that the situation in Haiti was 100 times worse than it was in Nicaragua or Jamaica. I think they were right.”

And now, with its capital all but leveled and supplies of any kind frantically needed, the situation is even worse than when Fowler last visited the island.

People in the Archdiocese of Louisville are responding, however.

“We’ve had those 375 volunteers donate about 1,500 hours of work, and we’ve collected supplies from 70 hospitals in the region,” Fowler said. “We still need supplies from hospitals, doctor’s offices — anyone who has them.”

When Hand in Hand and SOS began their response to the Haitian earthquake, Fowler said the goal was to raise $25,000 to pay for the collecting and shipping of supplies. “We’ve exceeded that goal, but we know there’s a lot that still needs to be done,” he said. “The need down there is so tremendous. We’ll keep going until someone says ‘we have everything we need’ — and that’s not likely to happen for quite a while.”