On January 12 a relatively moderate 7.0- magnitude earthquake hit Port-
au-Prince, Haiti. Sitting down at dinner that night, I told my wife,
Leslie, that I bet I'd be going. I am on a Navy contingency
engineering response team, and given our new trademarked motto, "A
Global Force for Good," we tend to jump at humanitarian stuff like
this. It makes us look better.
So a couple days later I was put on a short list. On Friday, January
22 I get a phone call:
"Are you packed? Can you deploy?"
"Yes."
"You leave on Monday. You will be gone six months."
"What?"
Well, it turns out we couldn't leave on Monday. There are a lot of
shots you need to be able to step foot in Haiti. And apparently the
earthquake destroyed the airport, making air travel hard and the
planes that could get in were filled with food and water. Engineers
were low on the shipment list.
After a couple key calls by people much higher than me, we secured a
C-130 to take us down on Friday the 29th. They let us know Thursday
evening. Flying on a C-130, and one packed with a couple pallets of
cargo, is not quite an airliner experience. You sit on cargo nets, put
in ear plugs, and freeze as the uninsulated plane climbs into the Mid-
Atlantic winter atmosphere. I nicely avoided this experience on the
way home.
We arrive in Haiti at an airport filled with planes from dozens of
nations. The crew unloading my plane is Haitian, I suspected, and we
couldn't communicate with them. As my team leaders conferred on why
there was no one around to pick us up, our pallets of gear disappeared
on a couple trucks. Bad thing.
Having come to the realization that the military organization that
requested the team did not think to pick us up, we called a
contractor. Having contracts personnel with us, we were very easily
able to get services from American contractors already in Haiti and
thrsty for work.
An hour later we find our gear in a dark corner of the airport. After
loading it onto a truck, we climb aboard a bus (which looked exactly
like any bus you have seen in any Caribbean/Central American based
movie) and headed out into PaP.
As it was 9:30 at night and electricity has never been a big item in
Haiti, we didn't see much at all that first day. Which was fine by me
because I was too tired to care at that time.
The military headquarters camp had no room for us, and the Embassy
turned us away, so we set up camp across the street from the Embassy
in a contractor laydown area. We had air conditioned trailers, though,
so I wasn't going to complain at that point. Our perimete was secured
by Haitians with shotguns, which seemed odd. I grabbed my sleeping
bag, found a rack, and slept soundly, at least until the old guys in
the trailer got some good resonance in their nasal cavities and shook
the trailer with their snores.
Day 1
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