The Third Wave (25 page)

On January 26, I was supposed to fly to Australia to receive the prestigious Order of Australia, the country’s highest honor for public service, for my work during the tsunami. Instead, I emailed to let them know that I couldn’t make it since I was going to continue volunteering in Haiti. I also sent a letter to my parents, which ended up getting published in the Australian press, and then picked up by news services around the world. The letter included the following description:

I’d felt so inspired by the people’s singing that first night that I started going to church in the tent village each evening. Sometimes, Sean and the other volunteers would join me. The “church” consisted of nothing more than a grassy clearing on a small rise at the bottom of the hill, where a few musicians played drums, keyboard, and guitar, and a preacher spoke through a microphone attached to several massive loudspeakers.

A little boy waiting in line for water

The preacher, a wonderful and inspirational man whose real-life name, I kid you not, was Pastor Cyncre (pronounced “Sincere”), spread a message to his people of joy, hope, rebirth, and personal responsibility. The Haitians sang along to the hymns with their eyes closed, faces glowing, and hands raised to the heavens, fervently expressing their devotion to God and prayers for assistance in the recovery effort. Their spirituality was profound and it gave me strength. During one powerful moment, I remember closing my eyes and lifting my hands skyward just like the Haitians, quietly calling for love to engulf and heal us all. I felt at one with the Haitian people.

Even if we weren’t attending the church services, we could hear them all the way up in our camp, thanks to the powerful speaker system. Pastor Cyncre would say each night, “Thank you to the Army angels in uniform. Thank you, Sean Penn. Thank you, Alison and Oscar and Captain Barry.” Then he’d thank the other NGOs working in our IDP (internally displaced persons) camp: OxFam, Save the Children, and Catholic Relief Services, among others.

Over time, Pastor Cyncre helped tremendously in our efforts. He was the backbone of the village. He registered people as official residents of the camp so that we could ensure an equitable distribution of aid to everyone there. He also organized teams of people to serve as a citizens’ patrol, keeping the villagers safe from violent looters and rapists at night. Thanks in large part to Pastor Cyncre, our camp was relatively peaceful, with lower crime rates than other IDP villages around Port-au-Prince.

Late one night while lying in my tent, I wrote this letter to my friends:

Our 103rd delivery. They named her Alison
.

On May 17, four months after the quake, we delivered our first stillborn baby. She was our first death in childbirth since we took over the hospital in late January. We’d had 103 successful deliveries so far. But this baby had already been dead inside her mother’s belly; her skull had been cracked open when her mother fell during the earthquake. Because most Haitians don’t receive prenatal care—and didn’t even before the earthquake—the mother hadn’t known that her fetus had died months before.

In New York, I had often thought of Twitter as a useless waste of people’s time and intellect, but in Haiti it became a valuable tool. Although I had hesitated to sign up, I ended up using it to call out to the world for help on a regular basis. One day, we had
a lady dying of rabies, so I sent a tweet out, and within four hours someone had the antidote flown in from the Dominican Republic to save her life. Days later, I was weak and sick in my tent after having vomited all night. When I called out for help from my tent, none of the volunteers around me could hear because the generator was blasting so loudly. So I tweeted my message, and someone alerted Aleda, a volunteer in the tent next to mine, and she raced in to help, which made us both laugh. Another time, when all the hospitals were out of oxygen, we found a fresh supply via Twitter by offering to trade some whiskey for it.

I spent most of my time helping to oversee the hospital, sharing love, and keeping the volunteer medical staff coordinated and happy. I also made regular trips with the mobile clinic out into tent villages across the city, since the people in many camps weren’t receiving any medical care at all. The government had declared mobile clinics like ours to be the most effective way of dealing with local health issues. We regularly visited Cité Soleil, a slum that was already in terrible condition before the quake.

The J/P HRO hospital

After our original team of amazing New York City doctors had left, we formed a partnership with CMAT/IMAT, the Canadian Medical Assistance Team and the International Medical Assistance Team, which would send us about a dozen or more doctors, nurses, and EMTs at a time, who would rotate through J/P HRO every two weeks. They were all hardworking, bright, passionate volunteers who were ready to jump into the fray the moment they touched ground.

Sean Penn continued to work his guts out. I saw him rescuing people, buying X-ray machines for many hospitals, and giving his personal items away. He slept in a small tent alongside the rest of us and ate rice and beans nightly, just like everyone else. He has committed himself to doing this work in Haiti for years.

J/P HRO took the lead as managers of our IDP camp, overseeing OxFam, Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children, and about a dozen other NGOs doing work there. Together, we worked to ensure that the village residents received tarps and tents for shelter, that they had enough food and water, that the latrines were kept up to standard, and that the children had a safe place to hang out during the day. Our camp was the largest in Port-au-Prince, with about 55,000 people visiting it during the day and up to 65,000 people staying over at night.

By May, our primary focus became relocating the village. It was time for us to vacate the Pétionville Golf Club land, not only because it was private property, but also because it would be in the middle of a flood zone as soon as the rainy season began. With the monsoons starting in July, we were in a race against time. Experts told us that the rains would destroy the shoddy, pieced-together shelters made from bits of tarp and sheets, which many thousands of Haitians continued to live in. Not only that, but water flowing in rivers through the streets and down the hillsides would turn the land into mud, which would mix with human feces from the ground and cause diarrhea and widespread outbreaks of communicable diseases. Our team began a “Beat the Rain” campaign focused on moving people out of flood zones and providing them with proper tents or even temporary shelters. Evacuating people is a tremendous task, requiring a great deal of planning, but we were fortunate to have military logistics experts helping us.

The Pétionville Golf Club course, where 65,000 displaced people live

In Haiti, I saw the same patterns that seem to show up after all disasters: The aid money gets stuck in bureaucracy, the NGOs have meetings upon meetings, small-scale local officials and large governments make increasingly impossible demands, and
nothing happens. The good news is that if you can predict what’s going to happen, you can seek to avoid it. I had learned from our experience in Sri Lanka, for instance, how devastating the rainy season could be to people already living in fragile conditions, so this time we planned in advance.

After a few months in Haiti, I could already foresee the uprising, the point when people would move out of the shock and sadness phases of their grief and into rage, turning against us. Then, the infighting would begin: the mad jealousy at the neighbors who were lucky enough to get more, the blaming of us aid workers for not doing a better job, even though the Haitian government was doing nothing for its people. In anticipation of that, all I could do was warn the others, steel myself with faith, and reach deeper into my heart for love and forgiveness. I was ready to unconditionally love everyone, even before they’d hurt me.

On our way back from a two-day trip to the coastal town of Jacmel, Oscar, a camp volunteer named Stephen, and I were passing the broken presidential palace when something caught my eye. I saw a professional photographer with a long lens on his camera, and then I noticed small fires burning in the middle of the street. Before I could put two and two together, a group of teenage boys with huge rocks in their hands came running at our car. I saw the whites of one boy’s eyes as he sent his rock flying directly at my face. In a split second, the danger registered in my brain and I dove to the floor of the car, covering my head with my hands. Oscar and Stephen did the same. Our driver sped off down the road from a crouched position, struggling to see over the steering wheel as the windows came shattering down around
us. He miraculously drove us to the safety of the Plaza Hotel, which was being guarded by two men with machine guns.