When I was first asked if I wanted to come to Haiti, I didn’t even have to think twice about answering. Who wouldn’t want to be given the opportunity to go to Haiti? I was given an approximate leaving time; the end of January. As January seemed to come and almost go, I found out on Saturday January 15th that I had a ticket JFK bound for Port Au Prince that Friday morning. It was then that I really started to ask myself what had I gotten myself into this time. It’s not that I needed more time to pack or get things ready (because, let’s be honest, I only start packing two hours before I leave for any trip, be it 6 months, one week, or an undetermined amount of time which this trip would fall under) but it was more I didn’t know what I was going to be doing, what Haiti would be like, and how long I would be gone for. (I still don’t know the answer to the last question which is a little bit frightening when I think about it). I was sad to be leaving so quickly but more excited to be finally doing something after not doing much since my job ended at the end of October.
The flight from JFK to Port Au Prince is around 3 hours and 47 minutes, give or take a few. As soon as we got off the plane we were overcome by the heat and humidity, quite a change from 4 hours prior where it had been snowing. The airport is small and once you go through immigration and find your bags which are not on a conveyor belt, but all piled together in a designated area. Once you have been cleared to leave the airport, you are bombarded with people trying to help carry your bags to just make a few dollars. As we waited for Jean-Yvon (the president of Pou Solèy Leve (for a rising sun) and a longtime friend of Jean-Paul Bonnet) we said good-bye to Jacob (JP and Jacob first met in Miami on a flight to Haiti days after the earthquake last year and we all just happened to be on the same flight again almost exactly one year later) who was staying at a guest house in Port Au Prince and we drove to Yvon’s house. Not even a mile from the airport there is a tent city set up. I have seen pictures, watched the news and have even been in some of the worst slums in Kenya, but to be living in tattered tarps under the relentless sun with no space of your own is something you have to see for yourself to truly grasp the severity of the situation one year after their world literally fell apart. As we continued to drive through Port Au Prince, it was reminding me of Kenya in so many ways; from the smell of exhaust in the air, to the people on the side of the street making a living by selling the same thing as the person next to them, from the streams of grayish black garbage filled water running down the sides of the street, to the music and honking of cars filling the air. There are still so many buildings half collapsed or more that I am not sure how they are still standing. Rubble and debris are lining nearly every street and sometimes there are big piles of rubble or rocks that there is only enough room for one car to get around. If I thought walking around Nairobi was bad, I hadn’t seen anything yet. There are so many steep hills and extremely sharp turns in the road let alone anything that resembles a sidewalk through most of the city. Thankfully Yvon’s house had no damage and everyone who was in his house that night was fine. To hear the first-hand account from someone who lived through the earthquake and then helped anyone who needed help, be it food medical care, a shower, or just some rest, is captivating. He jokes that he became a doctor and retired in just 2 days but I am sure he changed and saved the lives of many.
After a get settled in the house, Nick, a guy who is working at the General Hospital and who is staying at Yvon’s as well until Monday, comes back to the house and we all get to know each other. Shortly after, we head back down to the General Hospital to pick up Megan, who is a doctor heading up the TB treatment center. As Megan is finishing up for the day, Nick shows Dr. Bonnet and I around. The two of the recall a year when the hospital was like a battle zone and there were bodies piled up four feet high being taken away by the truck load to mass graves. We walk past the nursing school which completely pancaked and killed all of the students there. Every building and house has one of three colored markings on it, green means the building or house is safe, yellow means enter at your own risk and red means the building or house is not safe and is unlivable. As Nick was showing us around some of the buildings with red markings on them, we could see people were living in some of them. There was one building which still had Christmas lights on them from 2009. There are a lot of good things happening at the hospital. They have made a prenatal ward which has electricity and fans, there is clean running water scattered in different areas of the grounds, there is a lab built, and there is the TB ward.
The next day we took the SantéBus to pick up some rice for the children of Pou Solèy Leve in the mountains. Pou Solèy Leve serves as an afterschool program for the children in the area. It is up in the mountains a little ways so it was nice and cool by the time we got there. After spending some time talking to the children and handing out the rice we came back down the mountain and to the house. The following day JP, Jacob (who decided he didn’t like the guest house and came to stay with us for the remainder of his time in Haiti) and I went to visit Double Harvest where they have hundreds of acres of food growing and people from the community working to help them. We then had dinner with the founder of World Wide Village and some members of a mission group that had just arrived. After that long day, we woke up early Monday morning to have a meeting with a well-respected lawyer to see what we could do about getting NGO (non-governmental organization) status. Once you have that status you are able to get things in the country duty free and should have an easy time getting things out of the port. We are going to work on getting that status but it takes a very long time and only one group has been able to get NGO status since the earthquake and that was Sean Penn’s group. For Dr. Bonnet’s last day here we had a meeting with the assistant director of the General Hospital to see what they could do to help us get the buses out of the post as soon as possible since they are under the director of the hospitals name. She said even they are having a hard time getting things out of the ports for cholera treatment. This is the same story we have been hearing from everyone, that they have either medical equipment, food, vehicles, shoes, or any other type of aid stuck in customs. Samaritans Purse was recently on Anderson Cooper taking him in a helicopter over the port to show him all of their containers that have been stuck there for weeks. After we dropped Dr. Bonnet off at the airport, Jacob, Yvon and I went to spend some time at the deaf camp. As Jacob was interviewing 2 young men about how their lives have changed since the quake, a little girl made a direct line for me and grabbed my hand and held onto my arm and wouldn’t let go. After that none of the children were shy anymore and were all trying to sit on my lap and play with my hair. When Jacob was finished with his interview and told us how it went he said he was surprised to find out that the people living there were much happier after the quake. The reason for this they explained was that before they did not know each other but after the quake there was an organization that helped them find each other and start their own community which is fenced in and they are building semi-permanent structures. Pou Solèy Leve would like to start a program for the children who live there and perhaps eventually a tutoring program because sometimes the parents cannot help their children with homework when they have a question due to the fact that they themselves are not educated or because they cannot communicate with their children. There is a big mobile medical unit that St. Clare’s Hospital donated which cost the $250,000 and we would like to ship it down and park it in the deaf camp with teams coming twice a week. We cannot ship it until we know for sure that it will not be sitting in the port for months. We also have another mini bus packed and ready to ship but again, we cannot have them sitting in the port for months at a time because by the time we finally are allowed to pick them up they aren’t working and we have to spend a lot of money to have a mechanic come and try to fix it. The port we ship the buses to is not the one in Port Au Prince but one about 2-3 hours away in Saint Marc. Hopefully we will be able to get the 3 buses stuck in Saint Marc out within the next few weeks, if not sooner. Along with working on our NGO status and a few other projects I am going to be quite busy but it will be good to see things advance and to see the country grow and help itself. The next few weeks are also going to be quite interesting due to the fact that on February 6th the country will no longer have a government because there were no run-off elections and everyone seems to think they won the majority of the votes. That is all for this week. Next week hopefully will not be so long.
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