Giving Work - Europe, Haiti, and Beyond

   

 

Thus equipped, I set off for Santo Domingo. There, I was to meet a pilot named Dr. Bob to fly me across the border to Port-au-Prince. This seemed a far better plan than the earlier one, which had involved shipping the netbooks to the Dominican Republic to be escorted into Haiti by the Salesian Sisters. (I am told the Santo Domingo customs officials are sympathetic to nuns.) Alas, Dr. Bob’s plane was full. I ended up spending the night on the Malecon in Santo Domingo, Skyping with the Mission 4636 team in Haiti, San Francisco, DC, and Boston. The next day, I took a small Tortug’Air plane to Haiti, and managed to drain my Blackberry battery on the tarmac.  I was not prepared for Haiti.

 

 

 

 

Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince had giant holes in the walls. Outside, the impact of the earthquake was mind-blowing.

 

  

 

 At least 200,000 people perished in the earthquake, and the city remains in ruin. Smoke and dust covered everything. Hundreds of office buildings and centers of commerce had collapsed entirely, including the Haitian White House, which went from looking like this before the quake:

 

 

 

 

to this:

 

 

But despite the devastation, people in Port-au-Prince seemed excited to get back to their lives. I saw numerous scenes like this one – shopkeepers putting things back in order,

 

   

 

Children playing in makeshift camps, and hundreds of people lined up to get their cell phones working again.

 

   

 

 My mission in Haiti was to establish a digital work center in Mirebalais, a small town an hour from Port-au-Prince, to create jobs for the thousands of people that have fled the capital to find work through a partnership between Samasource, 1,000 Jobs/Haiti (a local NGO) and Mission 4636, a collaboration among several organizations to translate emergency text messages into English to assist aid workers in rescue operations. I arrived in Mirebalais and got to work, first setting up the Internet connection,

 

 

and then running a training for 47 local youth and refugees from the earthquake.

 

   

 

 They were extremely motivated – the training started on a Sunday at 6pm, after many of them had waited all day for us to show up, and ran late into the night. At one point, the power went out for several minutes and people pulled out their cell phones and used their screens to keep reading. Afterwards, several workers requested additional copies of our training manuals and asked when they could start full-time. I wish I had better words to explain the feeling I had in that room – these people had lost everything, but still had the will to work. 

 

 I am humbled.