The Third Wave (23 page)

While preparing
The Third Wave
documentary for the upcoming Cannes Film Festival, I received another call from Sean Penn, who had another bloody good idea. He wanted to take a busload of people across the country, volunteering along the way. We laughed about its being a
Partridge Family
–style bus, where he was Reuben Kincaid and I was Danny Partridge. I hung up the phone excited, thinking it might happen later in the year, and continued with my work on the film.

Ten days later, Sean called to tell me the volunteer bus trip was on—in five days’ time. He asked if Oscar and I would come help, and also requested that we videotape the journey. Five days isn’t a lot of time to drop Cannes preparations and go on a road trip across America, but my instincts told me to go.

After meeting Sean at Coachella, a three-day annual music festival held near Palm Springs, California, we spent two weeks driving across the country with more than two hundred people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, camping out at night and volunteering in different cities during the day. We traveled to Tucson, Arizona, where we went on an AIDS march with the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation, and to Austin, Texas, where we cleaned up the Barton Springs Greenbelt by picking up trash and removing invasive species, visited an organization that was building “green” houses for low-income families in the area, and attended a pro-immigration May Day rally. At night we’d sing and play music and stay up late talking around the campfire.

Sean Penn talking to the Dirty Hands Caravan volunteers

Our last stop was New Orleans, where we volunteered with an organization called Common Ground that was made up of young people from all over the country who had put their lives on hold to rebuild New Orleans after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. They were headquartered in the middle of the Ninth Ward, the area that was most affected by the hurricane. Nothing could have prepared us for the destruction we saw in the Ninth Ward. There were concrete stairs leading nowhere and empty lots where houses had once stretched for miles. Each lonely stoop was a gravestone for a home. Three years after Katrina, the place was still eerie and sad. It was hard to imagine what it had looked like before the storm.

The local people in the Ninth Ward wanted their lives to return
to normal, but since we were there for only a few days, we just did whatever we could. We met a woman whose home had been completely destroyed and had just moved into a new, yellow house—the only one on the block that had been rebuilt. It was a beautiful house but it was surrounded by a sea of mud. She wondered if the volunteers would help her construct a driveway and garden, so we rallied a gang of volunteers to do the job. We set out to build a makeshift pathway from whatever materials we could find in the area. We got our hands and feet dirty and slaved in the hot sun. As the garden came together, the woman said that we were angels sent to her from God.

Other volunteers went off to paint people’s houses and log dead trees in different parts of the Ninth Ward. Forrest, one of my favorite volunteers, went to help a woman who had recently returned to her house and had also lost her husband. He had been confined to a wheelchair before the hurricane and survived it, but he had recently succumbed to health problems. She showed the group the water stains left on her house by Katrina. Two miles from the levee, the water had reached nine feet; the scope of the flood was more than any of us could comprehend. Forrest and some others created a stone pathway, landscaped the garden, cleared rotten wood, and painted. The woman brought the volunteers water while they worked and kept saying, “Bless you, bless you, and thank you so much, you don’t know how much this means to me!” She was the only one on her street who had returned, and the neighborhood was eerily quiet. Everyone had moist eyes as they worked in silence.

Sean took a busload of volunteers to a massive tent city that had formed under the highway. These were homeless people who had jobs but due to the lack of affordable housing had been forced to camp in the shelter of an overpass. They would wake
up and put on nice clothes to go off to work, then return later to sleep in their tents. The volunteers dished out food and sat around speaking with the tent residents, offering words of comfort and just lending an ear. Another group of volunteers went to fix up an old church, and still others moved sheds that had traveled great distances with the floodwaters. A few others rode around on bicycles with a Common Ground worker, helping anyone who looked like he needed a hand.

After the trip with Sean officially ended, a group of seventeen volunteers decided to remain in New Orleans for four more months. In a relatively short time, all the volunteers had begun asking serious questions about the world and their role in it, and many of them felt that they couldn’t go back to their normal lives after seeing how much help was needed around the country. I saw that the trip had changed them the way volunteering after 9/11 had changed me. Watching the young volunteers restored my faith in humanity. I saw how even a short trip could make a difference—how a few days spent serving food to homeless people and repainting houses was enough to move the volunteers’ lives, and those of the communities they were helping, in a new direction.

The Cannes Film Festival was an extraordinary experience. Sean Penn was present at every film viewing and function. I have never seen anyone work so hard in all my life, and it inspired me to work harder. Bruce and Donny also came, and people swarmed around Donny, asking for his autograph and calling him the real Indiana Jones. When Donny met famous people, he would know that they looked familiar but wouldn’t realize that he had seen them in movies, so he’d often ask if they had met previously at the local football club back in Australia. This had us in stitches. We watched as Donny approached a confused Woody Harrelson, who seemed to be wondering if Donny was for real. The supermodel Petra Nemcova also offered incredible support for our film, as did many other celebrities, friends, and total strangers.

Bruce, Oscar, me, and Donny at the Cannes Film Festival

A few days before our film screened, huge earthquakes struck China, killing more than 100,000 people, and a hurricane also flooded Burma, leaving another 100,000 dead. The new disasters tugged at my sleeves and I wanted to go and help, but I knew it was important to share our message about volunteering with the world. On the day of the screening, Bono and Sean walked the red carpet with us. They had invited the whole Cannes jury to the show. Our film received a standing ovation and worldwide attention. I will always be grateful for the opportunity Sean gave us at Cannes. I will always be grateful for his incredible generosity.

Oscar and I were practically living in a darkroom in New York City. Although the romance between us had died, we were still very close friends and were working together every day on
The Third Wave
and a documentary about the volunteering trip we’d taken with Sean Pean. Editing the second documentary had dragged on for months longer than we’d anticipated, and I was aching to get back out in the field as a volunteer. We finished mixing the sound and called the film a wrap on January 14, 2010. Literally that same afternoon, I heard my phone beep and picked it up to glance at the text message that had arrived. It was from Sean Penn, and it read: “Haiti??” I wrote back at once: “Yes, let’s go!”

A catastrophic 7.0 earthquake had struck the poorest area in the Northern Hemisphere two days earlier, killing a quarter of a million people in Haiti and rendering most of the survivors homeless. Reports were coming in from journalists and aid workers on the ground that conditions in Haiti were horrendous. An estimated 300,000 people had suffered injuries, and yet with
an inept government, and the United Nations as well as other NGOs in shambles, the Haitians had limited access to medical care, food, and fresh water. It seemed like a summons from on high—one that I neither could, nor wanted to, ignore.

For the next few days, Sean, Oscar, and I raced around like crazy, Sean in Los Angeles, we in New York City. My primary task was to gather medical professionals to accompany our relief mission. An ER doctor from Manhattan’s Metropolitan Hospital had coincidentally friended me on Facebook a few days earlier, asking for my advice on international aid work. He had been all set to go to Guatemala, but when the Haiti quake happened, I wrote to him and said, “You have to join me.” He and I both posted to our Facebook pages that we were seeking medical volunteers, and within days we had ten doctors on our team. A couple of them were even Haitian and spoke Creole (Kreyol). My friend Randy Slavin and his mother, Nava, donated thirty boxes of medical supplies, including medications and equipment. Meanwhile, Sean raised half a million dollars from Diana Jenkins, a former Bosnian refugee who has devoted her life to humanitarian causes.

In the wee hours of January 17, Oscar, the doctors, and I set off from New York City in a private jet my fabulous friend Lisa Fox had arranged for us to borrow from the designer Donna Karan. Donna donated not only her plane but also a stretch limo to pick us all up, vials of essential oils, and fifty blankets to keep us warm at night. Lisa’s young son gave me twenty dollars to give to “the sad boy” he had seen on CNN.

In Miami, we met up with Sean, his friend the actress Maria Bello, Diana Jenkins, a doctor we called “Dr. Raul,” a security
man named Jim McGhin, Captain Barry, who was one of my favorite volunteers from Sri Lanka, and a few others. Sean and Diana had arrived with a cargo plane loaded with supplies that people had donated and that they’d had shipped in from around the world—food, medicine, water, security wire to keep us safe, a generator, and everything else you could think of that we could use for a journey to a land where we couldn’t count on finding anything. In addition, Sean arranged for 5,000 water filters to be transported from China, and they were delivered in just forty-eight hours.

Because the airport in Haiti was so overloaded and was restricting the number of planes that could come in, Sean had gotten clearance from the U.S. secretary of state for us to land. Nevertheless, our flight into Port-au-Prince kept getting delayed by hours. So we decided to take advantage of the extra time to do more aid supply shopping in Miami. Captain Barry took Sean’s credit card to the nearest Walmart to pick up additional food for our camp—sugar, canned goods, pasta and sauce, canned tuna, rice and beans, and other nonperishables that we would need as a team to survive for the next two weeks. Of course the cashier at Walmart noticed right away that Barry wasn’t Sean Penn, so Barry had to call Sean and make him come into the store in person. When he got there, they snapped a picture of him and put it up on the “good customer” wall.

Approximately eight hours later, most of us piled onto a jet for our flight to Haiti. There wasn’t enough room for everyone on board, so Oscar and Jim rode on the cargo plane, just lying on top of the goods.

Sean had arranged in advance for the U.S. military’s 82nd Airborne division to safeguard our landing in Haiti. The moment our plane touched ground, their trucks surrounded us. Clearly,
these soldiers were in full control of the situation. When we got off the plane, we found our Haitian contact, a friend of my friend Andrea in New York who ran a Mercedes dealership in Port-au-Prince. When we’d contacted him by cellphone to let him know what we’d be doing there, he had offered to provide us with a few trucks as well as several Haitian policemen to serve as our drivers and security detail. As soon as we’d unloaded our supplies from the cargo plane onto the transport vehicles, we took off into the unknown.

It was late afternoon on January 18 by the time we set forth into the chaotic remains of Port-au-Prince. It was excruciatingly hot and sticky out. My cargo pants got embarrassingly wet as my sweat dripped from every pore. We made our way slowly through the rubble-strewn streets. Dust filled the air and our lungs, making it difficult to breathe. Everywhere I looked, I saw crumbled buildings and fires. But the worst part of all was the smell: the sinister stench of the dead mixed with the nauseating odor of human waste. While many bodies had already been removed from the streets, there were still corpses all around us, buried under collapsed buildings or hastily tossed into shallow graves. Most of the water mains and sewage pipes had ruptured during the quake, causing human waste to stream down the streets.