Left above the clouds.

Well, things have been moving awfully fast on the ground here in Port-au-Prince (PAP), and taking care of myself has been on the back burner, hence the lack of updates.

I recently left Haiti for a week to connect with some friends that I hiked the Appalachian Trail with last year. By the time that I left PAP for the trail festival in Virginia, I was fast approaching total burnout. I realize upon reflection that with life in general and humanitarian work in particular it can be very easy to give yourself away. There is no shortage of people in desperate need, as you can imagine. All of the problems and deaths that you hear about daily overshadow any problem or concern that you may have. It is easy to feel guilty about your own challenges however large you might perceive them to be.

I left PAP early in the morning in a citywide blackout. Not knowing any of my flight details I left for a connection in Fort Lauderdale. There was a surreal moment upon takeoff, lifting above the blue tarps and brown streets, a quick flash of the cruise ship that the UN lives on just under the wing tip, climbing up through the clouds and finally above them I got a bit choked on how clean it was, and how broken I felt.

Last year I spent 7 months hiking the entirety of the Appalachian Trail. That long in the woods climbing mountains provided the most clear understanding of my place. I have never been more completely content with life and more engaged with my path. The people that I met and be-friended there continue to be the closest relationships that I have ever developed.

After a 14hr drive from Wisconsin down to Virginia watching the sunrise over green mountains and fog, I saw my friends again after almost six months. I found that I couldn't talk. I was quiet and a weight rested on my chest. If I couldn't talk to my closest friends, then what the hell had I done to myself? From balanced and content to happy but empty in 6 months.

Thankfully I had my friends and the woods to help me get back on track. By the end of the week I had found a bit of sanity and calm again. I walked up the hill from where we camped on the AT and got to the top of it looking out over the part of Virginia that had shown me my path last year, I started smiling and understanding my momentum. Despite the challenges and the work in Haiti, I am exactly where I am supposed to be and am so thoroughly satisfied helping and collaborating with my colleagues and the amazingly strong Haitian people. Until I am shown otherwise, this is my path.

-McBride

A hungry mob is an....

The day was relatively normal up until that point, that is if you call military helicopter, horn honking, political radicalism normal. Some of my friends had been invited to dinner with Danny Glover the night before, and he gave them a contact for some goods to distribute. They took off in a rush to get to the meeting and that was the last I heard. Than is until we got a call that the truck had tipped and they needed help. Neesh, Aaron, and I jumped up and started heading down to see what was up. The phone call (at least on our end) was serious but with a bit of laughter mixed in, so I figured it wasn’t really that bad. Sometimes it sucks being wrong.

Looking up the traffic jammed hill there was a mass of people and a pile of metal. Jogging to the scene some of our compatriots were standing atop a crushed tap-tap while throngs of people moved about. The local police had just arrived and were attempting to control traffic. One thing that should be made clear is the absolute lack of traffic laws, and when I say absolute, I mean it. Driving into oncoming traffic at 60mph while laying on the horn and being passed by four person moto bikes, while dodging frogger civilians is a common thing.

It turns out that the driver had wanted to avoid hills in his overburdened semi truck. He did this avoiding the hill thing in the only logical way, by driving up the biggest hill he could find. Normally these crazy guys would just gun it and pray. In this case he was in stop and go traffic. Mostly up the hill he tried to double clutch into gear and started rolling backwards. Then he started rolling faster, totally losing control. He cut the wheel and did a bit of a jack knife maneuver, tipping the cargo onto a (thankfully empty) tap-tap crushing it which tore the roof off the truck and spilled 50 kilo bags of powdered milk and whatnot all over the place. Meanwhile the cab had tipped onto a red car full of screaming people crushing it. Somehow no one was hurt, I have no idea how. So that paints the scene: truck crush, milk powder, cop yelling, people milling, red car owner shaking, cavalry is on the way.

Standing around the food trying to prevent any looting was critical to the safety of the situation. We’ve had some trouble in normal distribution situations, people getting trampled and beating each other for goods. Thankfully this group was more just watching the action than anything else. The people were crowding around tighter and tighter taunting us in Creyol, usually just laughing and poking fun at us, but some guys were angry looking at all that food with a few pieces of whitebread like us standing in the way. I felt like such a piece of crap standing there saying no repeatedly to people in my laughable Creyol. One guy was chanting in broken english perhaps the most perfect Bob Marley quote “a hungry mob, is an angry mob” over and over. At one point a man had picked up some food and I had to literally take it from his hands while the crowd yelled. All it would have taken was a spark and the situation could have exploded into a full scale mob scene.

Cue the cops. Just when we were feeling a bit claustrophobic and hoping things would calm a bit some douchey short-round cop rolled up on the crowd with an AK-47 pumping it in the air an yelling at everyone. The people scattered backwards screaming and falling over themselves into barbed wire and collapsed sheet metal panels. All this did was make the scene more tense.

It was starting to get dark, the cops wouldn’t let us touch a thing until some insurance company guy got there. They spontaneously decide that now is the time to have laws, with food in the streets and a huge crowd. After the third gun pumping crowd dispersion the dickhead cops decide that the only way to further calm the crowd is to beat the hell out of them with their nightsticks. People are getting cracked in the backs as they try to run away. It becomes apparent that this interaction is a remnant of the dictatorship. Utter oppression of the first and only freed slave state ironically still treated like slaves today more than two hundred years after they achieved independence.

A big truck that had been sitting across waiting for the go-ahead for two hours was finally allowed to be loaded up with food. The guys from Matthew 25 and all of our coalition friends lined up and chain loaded the truck. Somehow between us finishing the load up and the truck leaving the scene, the owner of the now full truck managed to get his finger ripped off. Things just kept getting more and more surreal. Since the majority of the food was powdered milk we were all covered from head to toe in the sticky powder, and as a bonus it smelled great. We loaded truck after truck in the dark while the cops beat people back, and hammered nightsticks on some kids that managed to crawl under the truck and pop out a floor panel pulling bags out from the inside.

Four hours later we finished loading the last bag of milk and tried to round up the last fifty or so tuna cans scattered on the ground. The crowd got their spark however and we backed away as they swarmed and piled onto the few cans while cops swung and yelled and we jumped twelve deep in a truck to make a safe getaway. A day in the life...

The Tents of Belleville

I've discovered that my favorite time of day is the midnight bucket shower. There's a little platform out back of the HRC compound with a blue tarp for a curtain. I'll stand there under the banana and palm trees and pour water over myself while looking up at the palm fronds and stars. It helps wash away the craziness of the day.

Across the street is Matthew 25, a NGO guest house of sorts. Run by Sister Mary, a hilarious lady that allows herself a beer every afternoon and only allows people over 74 to use her bathroom (naturally she's 75). She along with the Lions Club set up a camp next to Matthew 25 that shelters 1,400 people. The kids had a dance party the other evening and went completely nuts. It nice to see them have something to do rather than just sitting around bored.

Someone brought out an ancient looking laptop and like a typical DJ played ten seconds of each song while talking unintelligibly into the mic with a few sporadic air raid sirens mixed in (and by sporadic I mean constant). You'd constantly hear the kids say "blanc, blanc (white, white)", while running up and grabbing your arms and dancing with you. Running in big lines to a Ragga remix of 'Barbie Girl' until they'd topple over (hard) onto the concrete, and get up with a smile on their faces... Cue the siren.

The next day I was asked to help in some tent set-ups at a camp in Belvil that we've been working in. I met up with the cargo at the Medishare hospital tent near the Airport. A few weeks previous there had been two hundred tents flown in and in-between unloading and customs they were stolen by Airport security. Can't say that I blame them but it was hard for those that spent so much time raising funds and organizing the supplies to have it all for naught.

In the grand scheme of things the Belvil camp is in decent shape. There are some areas that still have not received aid at all, and for completely asinine reasons. The NGO that is in charge of it won't enter the area because it's considered a 'Red Zone', but it is only unsafe because they won't go in and help stabilize it with food and aid. Completely ridiculous.

I jumped up on the truck and sat on some tent boxes while we drove out of town past armed UN checkpoints and shattered buildings. About halfway to the area a flashy new Hummer with a giant American flag flapping off the back was swerving through traffic blaring the horn, mostly driving into oncoming traffic. This was Irene, the self proclaimed 'Godmother' of Haiti. She is pure makeup and jewelry, power-posture condescension. We roll up on the camp and she proceeds to try and prevent us from handing out the tents. I think the photo-op is the only reason that she's there. I just grabbed two tents and walked away from her babbling.

The camp in Belvil is home to 2,500 people only a third of which have any shelter. I was immediately mobbed by people yelling at each other about who was getting the tents. It was really unsettling to be in a position of choosing who gets a tent and who doesn't. Unfortunately I was told that we had enough tents for everyone which was not the case. I started setting up the first tent and some of the men gathered around. In broken French and Creyol I showed them how to set it up and tried to get a bit of a workforce together. I got a system going where I'd bring out two tents to places where the people were sleeping under sheets held up by broken tree branches. We would take down the hut and get them set up in a tent, but only after a huge yelling match between the various people involved. I was doing well with the guys helping me and getting the tents to those that needed them most.

On the other side of the camp however Irene's boyfriend was acting like the people's personal lord and savior. Screaming at them and taking swings at those that didn't cooperate, it was so frustrating to see the way they were treated. There are some aspects of humanity that I will never understand. How you could take advantage of another person when they are in such a desperate state is beyond me.

I went back for another set of tents and found that we were down to the last one. With 6-8 people per tent there were still another six hundred people that needed shelter. I walked around the back of the camp with a huge group of people while I tried to decide who was getting the final tent. Things started getting heated and I had to stand back and until the mayhem settled. I set up the tent for a woman with a family of nine and went back to the truck where they were getting ready to distribute some clothing.

Many of the children in the camp have no clothes and walk around naked. The only possessions of some of the families have is a cooking pot and the tent that our donors were able to provide. Distributions can be very dangerous, sometimes things get desperate and people start trampling each other for access to the food or clothing. In this case we tried to form a line and things went well until the donor brought out a box of toys for the kids and placed them down beside the line to hand them out. The kids swarmed around and then all of a sudden the adults were piling on top of the kids and there was a mob of people pushing each other and trampling those around them for a crappy G.I. Joe. I hope that isn't portraying these resilient people as animals, I have just never experienced how harsh life can be for people in these countries that our corporations exploit.

We helped as many as we could.

City of the Sun

I am usually awakened by our very own feral horny tomcat. He is not unlike a Tuvan throat singer is his ability to make all kinds of ridiculous noises. Between that and the fire ants I've been feeling very homely in the last few days. That's not to say that this place isn't absolutely amazing.

The rains have stayed away for now but that won't last long. There has been a mad dash by the NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations) to house as many people as possible before hurricane season, and by mad dash I mean having meetings and talking about what needs to be done rather than actually doing anything. Hopefully our organization can help fix that bureaucratic crap, or at least work around it. I'll make an upcoming blog post about what we are up to in particular.

On Sundays we usually visit Cité Soleil which as it turns out is the largest and poorest slum in the western hemisphere. It was originally intended to house workers at American assembly plants but people from all over the countryside looking for work moved in and squatted before the factories were finished. In 1991 after a coup d'état deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the international community placed a boycott on Haitian goods. That in turn closed down the factories and forced the 300,000 people in the area into extreme poverty (not exactly what the sanctions were intended to do). Cité Soleil is now run by various armed gangs, there is a total lack of all goods and services and illiteracy, AIDS, and violence run rampant. Any ads on the TV that ask you to sponsor a child, well this is where they live.

When we arrived the kids were making dream kites, and flying them over the shacks. On each of the kites the kid would write a dream that they have for Haiti and by flying them they were lifting their hopes out of the slums and into the clean skies. One little boy in particular was rocking it pretty hard. His pants didn't fit him and he would run really fast trying to get the kite up until his ass would be hanging out, then he'd stop to adjust, the kite would dip, run like hell... Then rinse and repeat: scamper, kite, ass, adjust, kite dip, scamper, kite, etc...

A few minutes walk into the shacks is a waterway that is still used despite the fact that you can literally walk across at any point on top of the trash and filth that fills it. There were two people from Amnesty International filming a bit of the scene and we spoke for a few minutes about what we were all doing in Haiti. Just across the way a man stood in a doorway and started singing to us in broken English to 'give a chance' and 'one love'. It made me feel ashamed to be there despite the fact that it wasn't some kind of tourist trip. We were there to spend time with the kids not to be rich white folks at the Hatian zoo. It was such an intense uncomfortable feeling. These people must see random whitebread with their shiny cameras and healthy McDonalds potbellies take their pictures and say "oh my god, this is horrible", and just walk away like everyone else.

The kids would come up all shy and touch my arms and pinch and pick at my skin. I don't think they understood the whole freckly Irish complexion thing. There were a few teen-aged boys that were dressed rather nicely considering the conditions, and at first I thought they were affiliated with some religious organisation.

A boy named David approached me and was hoping that I'd help him with his English. We spoke for a while teaching each other Creole and English when he asked me what I thought of Haiti. At first I didn't know how to respond. I said a bit nonchalantly that it was cool. What I meant was that I was enjoying my presence in the country and I was trying not to make it seem like Haiti was beneath me. The language barrier made that unclear and he started talking about his experience in the earthquake. We were sitting on a concrete table surrounded by half clothed dirty smiling kids and he spoke about how he prayed for Jesus to keep him alive while he hid in his house as it collapsed around him. It was so humbling sitting with him, seeing the anguish and fear on his face as he re-lived the experience. His home was destroyed, and as far as I could tell he was the only survivor from his family. With nowhere to go, he had no choice but Cité Soleil. He was wearing a button down shirt and slacks so that he was visibly apart from the poverty that is now forced upon him. It seemed that the clothes gave him a bit of comfort while trying to understand what his life now meant, they are the only things he has.

Theres always a first

It all started on two hours sleep. I spent the night in a warehouse field stripping supplies needed to bring on the chartered medical flight that we were taking. As it turns out south Florida, and Miami in particular regularly decide to shut down highways for fun. Our five lane 4am cruise to catch the flight rapidly dwindled down to two lanes, then one, at which point I commented on how I had never seen only a single lane open before. Then Alanis Morrisette's ironic lack of irony closed the highway down altogether. Yay. We finally got our proverbial asses into the terminal when we were told that one of us (Brenda) wasn't on the flight at all. Ultimately we decided that I should go on, and along with a bunch of rocket surgeons I was on my way to Haiti.

Its a short two hour flight and the only strange bit was the total obliviousness by the stewardess to the fact that we were headed to a disaster zone. She would make bubbly announcements about how happy she was that we were flying with her wonderful airline.

The country was enveloped in clouds and as we got closer to Port au Prince. Dipping below the cover, the devastation was uncanny even from 10,000 feet. There were hospital barges in the harbor next to battleships, and the landscape was littered with makeshift tent cities.
The most striking part of the landing approach was the amount of military on the ground. It looks like a war zone with the Hueys and armored personnel carriers mixed in with the rows of desert tan tents (you'd think that we specialized in desert wars or something). Touchdown in Port au Prince climaxed with Bubbles McGee uncomfortably pausing when she bade us farewell; 'Thank you for flying with us and I hope you have a wonderf..................... good stay.......... at which point I laughed so loud that I made her feel like an complete idiot, in the fashion that only I can.
Once down the presidential airplane evacuation staircase I discovered exactly what leaving Brenda behind meant. It meant I had seven 30 pound bags around my neck and a quarter mile to walk towards customs, who didn't care what I had and waved me through.

My first sight outside (besides the teeming, smoky, muddy, horn honkey, child beggy, cross eyed taxi driver that reminded me of the guy from Total Recall) was a fresh puddle of blood on the street. I can now check that one off the life list. The three breasted taxi driver and I followed Sam the motorcycle man back to the compound passing countless shattered buildings along the way. I've been in developing countries before (if you can even call Haiti 'developing'), but the disaster aspect of the scene is hard to describe. Concrete and people's things splashed across the streets, that aren't even streets anymore.

Of course my camera decided not to work from the moment that we landed, but I think it was good that my first impression wasn't from behind a viewfinder. As the military helicopters fly overhead I'm about to make some new friends with the handle of Jameson and giant bag of Starburst that I brought. Instead of East, I'm now South bound and down.

-McBride

Its the final countdown...

My bwains, oh the energy down here is ridiculous and the champagne is flowing. Tomorrow is the last real shower until the bucket is my whoresbath. there's a giant duffel bag with my name on it to be filled with variously ridiculously heavy things such as satellite phones or the like. The flight we're on is a chartery deal and the Port au Prince airport is sure to be a shit show, but I am looking forward to the on-the-back staring at the roof of my tent.