The Third Wave (24 page)

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 the Haitians had been reduced to scavenging for food and water, which they did with the wild desperation of the
dying. The scene also differed significantly from Peraliya because for the most part, the tsunami had killed people by washing them out to sea. Here in Haiti, all the corpses had remained on land, and many of the survivors were left with horrific wounds—deep gashes in their flesh, or crushed limbs dangling from their torsos by no more than a few tendons. I wanted to leap out of the truck and start handing out water bottles and cans of food, wrapping up wounds and giving hugs of comfort, but I knew from my experience in Sri Lanka that haphazardly distributing aid under such conditions could easily result in a riot.

Our first order of business was to find a safe place where we could set up camp, guarded by our locally hired policemen. They drove us deep into the hills to a place I called “the jungle house.” The large private residence, surrounded by plants, was half-destroyed, but it had a grassy area out back where we would be safe from falling buildings and could protect ourselves from potentially dangerous, hostile people in search of food. We put tarps on the ground to serve as a sleeping area, and I instructed some of the guys on how to build a latrine in the dirt behind the bushes, which I had learned from Donny in Peraliya. Sean had thought to bring a generator, so thankfully we were able to charge our cellphones, which was critical in keeping our communication lines open. Working into the night, we surrounded the entire area with the security wire we’d brought. This was the extent of our base camp at the start of our adventure.

A few things we didn’t bring, and wished we had, were tents, sleeping mats, and sleeping bags. We had assumed that, as in Sri Lanka, we’d be able to find a guesthouse or two left standing. What’s more, we wanted to save as much room as possible in our cargo plane for aid and medical supplies. But as soon as we had ventured out into the streets of Port-au-Prince, we’d realized our
mistake: We knew that we would have no choice but to camp outside, unsheltered. Those blankets that Donna Karan had generously donated were a godsend; without them, we would have had nothing but the clothes in our backpacks to cover ourselves with at night.

I cooked pasta for thirty people on a camping stove that evening and, along with Sean, Jim, Oscar, Maria, Barry, and the others, came up with a plan. The next day, we would set out with medical supplies to begin helping people.

It must have been midnight before we got to sleep under the trees, exhausted and eager to get to work alleviating the suffering we’d seen all around us that day. But just a few hours later, I was awakened by beautiful voices wafting through the bushes and trees. It sounded like an angel chorus from heaven. Although I couldn’t understand what they were saying, I could tell that these people were praying. Their song was full of a melancholy sense of love and gratitude, which brought peace to my soul. The next day, I asked one of our guards what had been going on. He explained that people began waiting in line for food distribution at a nearby church at 3 a.m., and praised God with their hymns until dawn to pass the time and ease their hunger.

Early the next day, most of the doctors headed to St. Damien’s, a pediatric hospital on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, and I went with them. The buildings were partially broken down, and what remained was a haphazard array of stretchers and people—children and adults—lying directly on the ground outside under a blazing sun. Many people needed immediate amputations or they would die from their infections. I learned that hundreds of
surgeries were being performed each day. I made it my job to tend to people’s wounds, give out love, and assist the doctors. There was no official leadership, so we all just did what we had to do. The medical teams were from all over the world and spoke eight different languages. Somehow we managed, spreading out and covering as much territory as possible. I even saw Mother Teresa’s order of nuns there, which fascinated me, as I had admired her my entire life. I kept sneaking looks at them in their white veils trimmed with blue.

On my second day at St. Damien’s, I was passing by a grated window when I heard voices calling me to help. Looking in, I saw eight people crammed into a small concrete room. They were holding down a little boy, probably eight years old, whose leg was a mass of swollen, rotting flesh. Spying the electrical saw in one of the doctor’s hands, I knew what was about to happen. I found the door and went in to help. After talking briefly, I discovered that they had given the boy some Motrin. That was the most powerful painkiller available.

That moment will be tattooed in my brain forever. All eight of us pushed down on the boy’s limbs and held his head still as the doctor sawed off the rotting leg. The boy screamed like someone being tortured. A few of his family members cowered just outside the door, weeping. My heart bled for the young boy, but I tried to stay calm and concentrate on holding him down. I knew that it was either a painful amputation or death for him.

After his leg had been hacked off, the doctors wrapped up his wounds in simple cloth bandages and laid him outside in the grass along with thousands of other patients. Amputations like that were being performed every half hour. At the time, most hospitals had run out of painkillers and had hardly any food or
even water to ease people’s suffering. I poured out my love and kept repeating the only phrase I knew in French,
“Je t’aime,”
which means “I love you.”

We spent two nights at the jungle house, but it wasn’t secure. Late on the second evening, a few Haitians tried to sneak into our compound. They knew that we had food and supplies, and they were determined to take what they could, even if they had to resort to violence. Our police bodyguards, along with Sean and Jim, managed to scare the intruders off with guns, but the police confessed to us the next morning that their weapons had no bullets. If the looters returned, we could be hurt or even killed.

In the wee hours of the morning, I was awoken again by angelic singing. At first light, I set off with Oscar, Sean, Maria, and a bodyguard to find the people waiting in line. As we searched, we stumbled across the new home of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne division, which was on land that belonged to a private golf club called the Club de Pétionville. A ritzy area in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince, Pétionville had suffered significantly less damage than the rest of the city during the quake, in large part due to better construction. When the concrete walls of the private golf club had fallen down, approximately 50,000 to 70,000 displaced Haitians had moved onto the rubble-free grass of the golf course. The area around the clubhouse was easy for the military to secure since it had a helicopter landing and sat high atop a hill overlooking the golf course. When the 82nd Airborne found this location just after the quake, they immediately rented it from the club and set up their operations on the tennis courts. One of the surviving buildings even had a bathroom with a few toilets and shower inside that functioned when the club owner could get
water pumped in. It was there at Pétionville Club that we found the people who had sung out in the night.

Sean sat down with Lieutenant Colonel Foster to figure out if we could help. Lieutenant Colonel Foster explained that a small team of DMAT (Disaster Medical Assistance Team) doctors and medics had come with them and had set up a hospital on the hillside. They had hardy cloth tents, stretchers, bags of medical supplies, and had been venturing out to treat the wounded. Nevertheless, Lieutenant Colonel Foster said, they needed more medical help. Since they needed help and we needed their protection, a deal was made. We got our own tennis court to live on in exchange for assisting with the hospital and cooperating with the military in other relief efforts.

The next day, the military showed up at our jungle house with their huge trucks to transport our supplies and us over to Pétionville Club. The volunteers breathed a sigh of relief as we drove through the set of large metal gates guarded by armed U.S. military. After a hot, sweaty day spent moving and arranging our gear, meeting the hospital staff, and setting up a simple kitchen, we lay our blankets out on the tennis court. That night, we slept soundly, knowing that we were safe.

Over the next few days, our camp began to take on a more settled and structured atmosphere. Or so it seemed at the time anyway. Looking back now, I laugh at what a ragtag, makeshift scene it was. The Army gave us several pieces of camouflage drapery to hang over the tennis courts as shelter from the sun. We started to acquire random bits of furniture from the debris: a chair, a table, a few cots, and a bucket for our kitchen. As volunteers came and went, they left their tents behind, so more and more of us had places to sleep and store our gear.

One night I heard a scream from Diana’s tent and went running
over to her. Seconds later, Sean was there capturing a huge tarantula with his bare hands. It was a Steve-Irwin-the-Crocodile-Hunter moment as Sean carried the frightened critter out into the bush and away from Diana. Most nights, I heard women’s heartbreaking screams far off in the darkness of the neighboring town. I knew it wasn’t tarantulas they were scared of, but a gang of men who were known to be moving about raping helpless women. The piercing screams would go on for hours. I felt helpless to do anything but pray.

Soon we posted a sign, and Sean arranged for someone to bring baseball caps and T-shirts in with our mission’s name on them so that the Army and others could easily identify us as part of J/P HRO, the Jenkins/Penn Haiti Relief Organization.

As soon as we had settled into Pétionville Club, I coordinated with the military to find out how the J/P HRO doctors and I could be of greatest service. The 82nd Airborne agreed to send several armed men and their Hummers out with us to treat people in the tent villages and on the streets of Port-au-Prince, where people lay rotting on the ground, unable to get to hospitals. Each day, our mobile strike team set out at the crack of dawn in Hummers, and then walked miles and miles through the putrid, sewage-filled streets with our heavy backpacks full of medic gear and our military guards surrounding us.

When we found people with heinous infections and sores, we’d clean out the wounds with saline, douse them with disinfectant, and wrap them up in bandages. It was Civil War–type medicine, and often as we worked, a crowd of thirty or forty people would gather closely around, watching the spectacle. The whole
time we’d be dripping with sweat and suffocating from the stench.

On a particularly hot day, one of our military escorts saw me swaying back and forth and raced over to catch me before I fainted, then pulled me away from the crowd. He fed me a sort of homemade Gatorade solution—water mixed with salt and sugar, which works wonders as a natural rehydration mechanism—and within minutes I was back in action. The military watched our backs closely and were our guardian angels. Sometimes we’d find people in such fragile condition that we’d take them along with us for the rest of the day until we headed back to camp, where we delivered them to the hospital. Each time we went out, we felt overwhelmed at how big the disaster was and how there weren’t enough NGOs on the ground to help.

The Army couldn’t afford to use their vehicles to shuttle us about all day because they had important food and water pickups elsewhere around town. So at the end of each long, exhausting day, we’d march back to camp, often five or six miles away, trying to keep up the grueling pace our military guards set. We needed to be back before nightfall because with no electricity or lighting, Port-au-Prince became more dangerous at night. (Even during the day, it could prove hazardous. Sean once got stuck in the middle of an angry mob, and his driver had to use expert maneuvers to escape in reverse down the street.) On the long hike home, the 82nd Airborne would chant military songs to keep us motivated, just like in the movies, which I loved. We’d be on the verge of collapsing by the time we reached the bottom of the hill at Pétionville Golf Club, but we still had an arduous final march straight up the slope to our camp. On the plus side, I lost twelve pounds in the first few weeks and got a great suntan.

Me and the gang after a long day in the field

Taking a cold shower on the days when we had a bit of running water felt like a miracle. Otherwise, we had to make do for days at a time with wet wipes and some sprinkles of bottled water to rid ourselves of the stink and sweat.

After approximately two weeks, the military medical team left Haiti. They had planned to take their large hospital tent and supplies with them, but we begged them to leave those behind. We were still seeing more than 1,000 patients a day at the hospital, and the deep wounds and infections we were treating were life-threatening. Lieutenant Colonel Foster from the 82nd Airborne agreed with our need for the hospital to remain and immediately called the White House to get permission for the equipment to stay. Much to our relief, the orders soon came back from Washington that the hospital was to be donated to J/P HRO. I was now in charge of coordinating the hospital and its staff.