5:53AM and I was awake in my tent after my first night in Port-au-Prince. It was first light and the assortment of various media and aid workers were all slowly stirring. I met up with a colleague of mine to check email and work out what we were doing for the day. We ended up sharing a car with a reporter and photographer from The Times of London, and headed to the UN Compound at the airport. From there we managed to organize joining a UN World Food Programme convoy that was heading into the Champ de Mars area of Port-au-Prince to deliver two trucks full of rice. As we headed into the city, more and more people started running alongside the convoy – men, women and children all desperate for food. By the time we arrived at our distribution location the crowd had swelled to thousands of people – between us we guesstimated around 5-6000 people were clamoring to pick up a sack of rice.
We were told this was the largest food distribution the UN had carried out so far, and yet tragically they only had enough to allow women, children and the elderly past the UN barricade to collect rice – many thousands went without. This led to chaotic scenes and near riots ensured. The Brazilian UN soldiers responded by spraying the crowd with tear gas and I myself copped it three times leading my eyes, throat and neck to burn – I coughed and felt like vomiting. It was absolute madness and in the heat of the moment a young Haitian man turned and looked at me. With both our eyes streaming and coughing our guts up he shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and fist-pumped me. It was a very strange feeling, a connection in the middle of chaos and desperation. Shortly after I photographed the lucky few who received food and then we headed back to our base with the Times team to wire our pictures.
