After more than a decade of battling the rampant poverty, crime and pollution of Haiti with friends and family, Pat Jussaume has no plans to stop bringing aid to the Caribbean nation.

Jussaume, a Pelham resident, said it is the country’s orphaned children that has kept her and a group of contractors, handymen and good Samaritans from across New England coming back every year.

“It’s the poor of the poor. They live in little huts with tin roofs, with no running water, no utilities, no electricity,” she said. “It’s a whole different culture, but yet the people are basically pleasant, cordial, kind. The kids love it when you come down.”

Jussaume, a music teacher in Lowell, Mass., has returned regularly to the impoverished Caribbean nation to work with a small orphanage on the outskirts of the capital of Port-au-Prince for the past 11 years.

In that time, Jussaume has been joined by a group of friends and family, including her husband and her son and daughter, all of whom have donated their time and resources to making life for 65

“We were able to install and build a bathroom with flushable toilets and showers, screens to keep out the mosquitoes and lights for the kids,” she said. “Last year we built a library for them. We do as much as we can every year, depending on the needs.”

Since her first trip to Haiti, the orphanage has grown to three stories and doubled in size. With building materials donated from local businesses and a diverse group of volunteers, Jussaume’s group has done everything from installing plumbing to running electrical wire.

“We actually built a basketball backboard and frame and we put it up in the kids’ village, which is up against the orphanage wall, and we must have had 150 kids high-fiving us,” said Jean Soucy, a metal fabricator from Tyngsboro, Mass., who has been on eight of the trips to Haiti. “Everything is broken, so people don’t have time to put up new stuff. They’re always repairing something, air conditioners or vehicles. To get something new, that’s something that we have to do when we go down there.”

Out of the dozen or so teams of volunteers that visit the orphanage every year, Jussaume and Soucy’s team is the only group that handles construction work. Supplies that have not been donated are purchased from funds raised throughout the year and are either shipped to Haiti from the United States or purchased on the ground.

“We’re up early, we stay late. It’s exhausting work with the heat and everything else. That’s what makes it good to go down there,” Soucy said. “We depend on a lot of people to give us donations and stuff, and we usually pay our own way down there and then we use the donations to purchase the materials we’re going to use down there to do our jobs.”

Each member pays roughly $1,000 out of their own pockets to cover the cost of airfare, food and housing while in Haiti. Any funds received through fund raising or donations are put toward building materials, medicines and food for the orphans.

For Jussaume’s daughter Nicole, who just returned from her fifth trip to Haiti, it’s the children as well as the experience that keeps bringing her back.

“(The orphanage) is very well kept. The staff in the orphanage is wonderful for the kids. The kids are very well taken care of. They’re so excited,” she said.

The group has hopes to eventually be able to build a new orphanage in the countryside with schools and a medical clinic for the children, but without the major funding needed for a project of that size, Jussaume said the team will continue to focus on keeping the orphans fed, healthy and educated.

After having seen what a small group of volunteers can do in one week, Soucy has plans to return to Haiti and stay for a few months.

“We bring so much when we go down there as far as talent and organizational skills to make things happen that a couple of months of a few good guys could make a big difference,” he said. “That’s why we go, we go for the children. In order to be in this orphanage, both parents have to be dead, so we got these little guys looking up at us and they don’t have a prayer unless we get down there.”