Medair

January 2010, Port au Prince Airport

Since I was coming from Chicago in January, the heat was the first thing to hit us followed immediately by noise and chaos.  We had a few power bars, our water was already gone and there were no bathrooms.  The only thing we could do was stand and wait for a flight to Jacmel. I snapped this shot as we waited.  The helicopter, in addition to the International Red Cross/Red Crescent truck announcing “Beleive (misspelled) in God” with a smashed vehicle summed up some of the confusion and chaos.

January 2010, Jacmel

After a 17 minute Mission Aviation Fellowship flight from Port au Prince, we arrived in Jacmel on the South coast of Haiti. We walked the streets and spoke to the survivors to assess the needs of the community.  I remember all of us feeling such deep compassion and concern as we watched people dig through what was once their homes to salvage one or two pieces of cloth or a chair.  If you look at this photo you will see a makeshift tent made of bed sheets and sticks while clothes dry on a rubble “clothesline” in the background.

Pinchinat Camp

On the site of the cities football pitch (soccer field) a large tent city had already taken shape. I had worked with displaced camps before and it is almost always better to help people return to where they have come from as quickly as possible. We were striving for ‘early recovery’ from the earthquake and we were concerned that these camps could become informal settlements where safety and health are difficult to maintain. By the time I left Haiti in June, we had moved a third of this camp’s population back to their neighborhoods.

Greta’s House

We stopped by this house and met the owner, a lady named Greta. We asked if she would like our help and she accepted but said that she did not have any tools or a way to haul the rubble away.  We asked if she could have 10 to 15 friends and family members at the house the next morning and we would bring tools and a truck.  The next morning we showed up and there were over 20 people eager to help. Our work began.

The Long Walk Home

We had two engineers on our team who taught us all how to safely demolish and remove rubble.  The work days were hot, dusty and exhausting.  Sometimes the dust from all the rubble would make it nearly impossible to breathe.  At the end of everyday we would collect our tools into wheelbarrows and push them back to a secure storage space loaned to us by the Salvation Army. One evening on our long march home we stood a bit taller and held our heads a bit higher when one of the Haitians saw us and said to the person next to them “That’s Medair, they are like us and work hard.”