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.
AFTER a sleepless night in Santa Domingo I awoke and met my new friends from Food for Hunger for breakfast. I’d tried, unsuccessfully, to get us on a World Vision flight into Haiti, and they’d tried, equally unsuccessfully, to get us onto a UN flight. Their local man on the ground, Jose, advised us that the best route was via bus. He dropped us at the bus station and we queued for around two hours for tickets. We departed at 11:30am local time for an eight hour journey to Port-au-Prince, the largest city devastated in the Haiti earthquake. We made it to the border at Jumani in good time, on a bus full of returning Haitians, media and a large group of Americans who’d flown out to try and do some good. At the border we were held for over an hour as they very slowly processed the stream of vehicles heading into Haiti. Once we were in, the roads changed dramatically, we twisted and turned through the coastal roads and up into the mountains on unpaved roads, crawling along at a snail’s pace. The people in these outer areas were going about their regular business – watering cattle, collecting crops etc but as we drew closer to the capitol city we started to spot buildings that had ‘pancaked’ or collapsed during the earthquake. More and more tent settlements sprung up along the route until we arrived in the city in darkness and could still make out people searching through the rubble of collapsed buildings, desperately searching for survivors two weeks after the tragedy. I’d arrived in Port-au-Prince.
The journey started with a 6:50am departure from Burbank Airport in Los Angeles into Phoenix, Arizona. I then switched planes for one heading to Philadelphia and at this point I started recognizing a few travelers as aid workers and media – all sporting a scruffy face and tan combat pants that seem to be de rigueur in these circles. I felt quietly pleased that I’d packed mine. Once in Philadelphia and boarding the plane to Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic the nerves really started to set in. Here I was, without even a place to stay in the DR overnight, heading to Haiti on a wing and a prayer.
My conscience panged as I took my seat in first class. All of my fellow travelers in first appeared to be aid workers – I couldn’t help but wonder if it was money well spent by their charities. I paid for my upgrade out of my own pocket, perhaps they had too.
By sheer good fortune the gentleman I was sat next to asked if I minded switching seats so that he could sit next to his friend and as I was traveling alone I duly obliged and took my new seat next to David, an NGO working for Food for Hunger. We ended up chatting for most of the flight, and shared a few rum and cokes to ease the anxiety we were both feeling. David was being picked up at the airport and very kindly offered me a ride with two of the local guys working for his charity. We breezed through customs and immigration in Santa Domingo with a few cursory glances and mutterings of ‘Haiti’ and then David was met by Jose and Marciella from Food for Hunger. They agreed to give me a ride to the hotel Tropicana where the rest of their group were staying for the night. After getting a room in what can only be described as a very basic motel for $50 per night, I tried unsuccessfully to connect to the wireless internet and resigned myself to getting some sleep after a long day. I brushed my teeth, making sure to use bottled water to clean the toothbrush, set my knife and mace by my bed, bolted the door and headed off to dream of what lay ahead tomorrow.