The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [75]
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.
As at Ground Zero just after the first tower collapsed, and in Sri Lanka shortly post-tsunami, people walked around with shocked, blank expressions on their faces, resembling the damned in a vintage horror film. The difference between this and New York City after 9/11, though, was that after nearly a week without help, many of