I first met Dr. Chris Hansen in 2000 when we went on a trip to Haiti together to visit an orphanage he was supporting. He was going there to monitor the project’s progress and I had volunteered my services to make a fund raising video for the project. So began a friendship that lasted until Chris’s death in 2010.
I knew very little about Chris’s mission in Haiti and so I filmed constantly for two weeks to gather material about his work with the chidren but also to learn what it meant to be a volunteer working in the developing world. I saw the scale of the problems facing Chris in Haiti and witnessed the tension mounting between within Chris and Florence as he was unable to provide all that she wished for. This material later became the heart of the Rocket Man documentary.
I think like most people who first come in contact with Dr. Chris Hansen, I looked upon him with awe. He was someone who had spent his life volunteering and I was impressed by his sense of service and love of humanity. However I soon noticed that his family had a more balanced view of him and over time, as I grew closer to Chris and spoke with those who knew him, I came to realize that he was not in fact a “Saint” but a man full of contradictions. He could be frustrating and disorganized, while also being dedicated, compassionate, courageous and funny.
For me his personal imperfections only made his work more impressive. His voluntary work, tending to poor and sick children all over the world, put him in dangerous environments and caused him considerable hardship but that did not stop him being, “Pediatrician to the Poor” as he half jokingly called himself. His humor masked the effects of the debilitating bi-polar condition from which he suffered and allowed him some protection from the pressures of the emotionally draining work he was engaged on. Chris was constantly confronted with situations where there were more sick children than there were available resources, and faced with the question: “how many children are we going to help” he acknowledged that he didn’t have an answer. Instead he cited a children’s story in which a young girl sees thousands of dying starfish washed up on a beach. An old man sees her returning some of them to the water and asks her how she can possibly make a difference – “there are so many of them”. The girl puts another starfish into the water and says, “It makes a difference to this one”.
Michael Coulson
Chris died in February 3rd 2010. Aged 77. That Spring, at a packed memorial service at Chris’s local Buckingham Friends Meeting House, a diverse group of friends, work colleagues and family members shared their thoughts about him, describing how he had influenced them or helped them in some way. These touching personal testimonies made me realize how privileged I had been to accompany Chris to Haiti and inspired me to revisit the footage I’d shot of him over the years. That material grew as I interviewed many of the people from the memorial service – healthcare pioneers such as Doctor Jack Geiger and Doctor Bob Smith who, after working for the Civil Rights movement, helped found the nation’s first health care center with Chris in Mississippi in the 1960s; Child Psychologist Wendy Matthews, Chris’s colleague during his days working with the Department of Youth and Family Services in Trenton, combating child abuse and AIDS; Dennis Micai who runs the Trenton Soup Area Kitchen where Chris volunteered towards the end of his life; and Chris’s daughter-in-law Anne Hansen, who was inspired to work in medicine through Chris’s humanism and is now director of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Boston Children’s Hospital. After approximately four years, I have now been able to put together a portrait of Chris which, as well as highlighting Chris’s inspirational work with the children at the orphanage, it also gives us a dramatic insight into the triumphs and challenges associated with being a volunteer in a developing country like Haiti.