But the resilience of the people in this town is energizing. There is so much sadness and widespread destruction but every street has people sweeping, clearing, and even building anew. The town is smaller than the big city, so the response by aid workers seems to scale and within reach of addressing the need. The budding filmmakers have lost family members and homes, but they race around town documenting a disaster, preserving images of heartache and hope, spreading information to interested parties abroad. I feel humbled by their work. They offer me tape of critical moments and we exchange reporting tips. I want to linger in their optimism, but we need to take off before the sun falls or spend the night in the car. I think a lot about the kids in this town, and their work lifts me out of bed every day I’m there.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE LIGHTHOUSE
Jonathan Olinger is so young he is almost like my baby brother. He’s post-college, preadult. He is a devout California Christian who was once a skier who almost turned professional until he took up filmmaking. Jonathan’s mom, Tawni, had gotten pregnant as a nineteen-year-old. His father left them and his mother raised him alone in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Jonathan has a rare heart disease called truncus arteriosos that has required eleven surgeries, three to his heart. Yet he left his ski town to visit thirteen nations because he became captivated by the plight of other children. He has never had any money and doesn’t expect he ever will. Yet he gives of himself to others.
Jonathan has the visionary attitude that young folks contribute to America’s promise. He believes video can change the world for the better. He is unafraid to just up and travel to some desolate, scary, miserable place to spotlight children in need. He is bold. He founded a small nonprofit organization called Discover the Journey with a few friends, including his girlfriend, the photographer Lindsay Branham. They have taken off for the Congo, Uganda, and Iraq and shot videos. I find him and his faith inspiring. I am a true believer that we have much to learn from youth.
I meet Jonathan in Haiti because he has been shooting video of Maison de Lumiere, the Lighthouse, an orphanage run by Christian missionaries. He began documenting their vision in 2004, charting their progress in the years since. He hustled to get himself back into Haiti as soon as he heard about the earthquake. He is a journalist of the future, detached from many of the old rules that don’t apply to him. He mixes his journalism with relief work, Christianity, advocacy, and has personal relationships with people who share his quest for social justice. I am searching for a way out of the mind-set that we are covering the unfathomable, the unfixable, a problem with no solution, another Katrina where the people have been abandoned to a harsh sea.
The moment I arrive at the Lighthouse I find the answer to the question that has been nagging me since we arrived—how does any one person make a difference in the face of such an enormous tragedy? Susette and Bill Manassero came to Haiti at the urging of their oldest daughter, Ariana. She was nine and had saved coins to sponsor needy children in Haiti. She wanted to go for a visit. The Manesseros were indulging her when they came to Haiti and were shocked to find the high rates of poverty, sex trafficking, and child abandonment—some of the worst in the world. The children they met were being abused. They were on what they thought was just a casual visit. They made a drastic decision, one that is inconceivable to so many of us. They sold everything and moved their three young children to Haiti.
What the Manasseros have built in Haiti is stunning to say the least. They have a boys’ and a girls’ orphanage, a feeding program and ministry, a clinic and sports program. The central component to all of it is the guesthouse. Jonathan has spent a lot of time videotaping there. Christian volunteers come and live at the Lighthouse, bringing their skills and enthusiasm and taking home a commitment to spread the word and raise funds. The volunteers are moved by a desire to leave behind their plastic lives, grasp meaning, and pursue God’s grace. The last group that came got much more than they bargained for with this devastating earthquake.
Robert Taylor had volunteered to build furniture. Amese Kubicki had brought her stepdaughters there to get them away from the frivolity of Orange County so she could build some character into them. When I arrive, Robert is working in the clinic helping badly wounded people and Amese is caring for traumatized children. The Manasseros are guiding all these untrained people in critical disaster work while running an orphanage. They have just shut down a clinic they opened to the public. For days, wounded, battered, bleeding people of all ages had overwhelmed the volunteers. Aid workers came to assist but there just weren’t enough of them. Volunteers like Robert and Amese assist with amputations and splints, things far outside anything they have experienced. The orphanage just couldn’t keep up the pace.
Jonathan has been videotaping the precarious situation here. The forty-seven children are sleeping outside in a big concrete play yard they call the “bins.” They are afraid to go inside because of the aftershocks. The walls around the girls’ orphanage have collapsed, so they are not secure from bandits. Many of the children are uncharacteristically quiet; some are attached to the laps of volunteers and older children. When we arrive, kids swarm around us instantly, checking out our BlackBerrys and cameras and just wanting to play There is a girl named Cendy, pronounced “Cenzy” in Creole, with assaulting eyes that look at you while she smiles off into the distance. There are babies everywhere whom people pass off to each of us. The boys run up laughing and want us to take their pictures. They may be sleeping outside but every child couldn’t be cleaner or better dressed.
Bill and Susette are amazingly calm bearing all this responsibility, considering they are close to running out of food and water. Bill has a very happy daddy personality in the face of the worst situations. He has a graying beard and mustache and is dressed all in khaki. He is constantly in action, working to keep this place running, fueling up generators, moving furniture, making endless drives back and forth between the various facilities. He pats about a hundred heads an hour. Susette is also in constant motion, delivering orders to an army of volunteers, employees, and older children with a calmness and delicacy that sends everyone off feeling they have been given a vote of confidence. This woman has it all together. It is nearly one hundred degrees outside. An earthquake has just flattened half her city. They are short on everything they need to survive and unsure whether help is on the way And she is wearing perfectly applied eyeliner and completely coordinated jewelry She is Cuban American and has that Latina sensibility that makes everyone feel as if they are part of one big family on the move. I like them both instantly.
As soon as we arrive, I seem to enter their whirlwind and just follow where it takes me. There is no way to talk with these people without keeping up their pace. We set up cameras in an effort to debrief Ariana on her inspirational story, and even then she and her younger siblings continue running the orphanage as we are putting on their microphones and sitting them down. I barely spit out a few questions before Susette pulls me off on one of her rescue missions. The Manasseros are treating the crisis as their full responsibility I am awed.
Until this very moment I felt like I had Katrina stuck in my head, the image of a nonresponsive government and a disempowered public. I came to Haiti expecting nothing from their government and next to nothing from my own, even though its shore is just a quick plane jump away Now, sitting in a Jeep with this Energizer Bunny of a Cuban woman, I am suddenly transported to another mental place. Susette is just pulling up her bootstraps and hitting the streets like Angela back in Pearlington, Mississippi.
I am rattled. Everyone is, actually There are not just dead people all over this town, but there are aftershocks big and small. You don’t know what to expect or when to expect it. There is not enough food or water and no power at all. So driving through Port-au-Prince is like driving through desperation. I lose track of how many places we visit where the people need help. Susette has so little to give out, but she has boxes of canned goods and bread and water and is doin
g her part. We go to another orphanage where the kids are all sitting quietly outside. The director says he is desperate. He has no sponsors in the United States anymore and has no one to call for help. They have no food left and the kids are weak. She hands them all bread and they eat, but there is no long-term solution to deliver.
We walk through a ravine where tents are being raised. The people are eating where they sleep and go to the bathroom. This place can’t last. I know no Creole but I have no trouble communicating. I barely use our translators. It’s amazing how people can make themselves understood in a crisis. Their French meets my few words of French and Spanish and hands move. The next thing you know, we are walking right behind them to see an injured child or a damaged home. Everyone wants to tell us his or her story They want America to know they need help.
A school next door has pancaked onto tiny desks and word is it was full of children. People walk by carrying bags of recovered supplies. Cars roar by carrying loads of people, injured and hungry, to unknown destinations. Someone occasionally carries a gun, but mostly they are just normal folk on their way toward nothing in particular. We walk down a ravine, dense with tiny structures fractured by the earthquake. People are living in the rubble of their lives. We take Susette and go visit her former wash lady, who breaks down into her arms. She has five children living in a small one-room concrete hut with a tin roof. Her oldest child, Daniel, used to work for Susette and now goes to college. He is the sole provider for his family and he is missing. She shoves his picture in my hand and wails. I need no translation.
This all feels like it happens in an instant, but it takes a full day I bounce through the cracked streets of Delmas 73 in Port-au-Prince in Susette’s Jeep, racing along as if we are headed for an emergency room even when we are going a few blocks. Tall iron gates with no windows swing open to our last stop. We enter the grounds of Quisqueya Church, a vast grassy enclave where several orphanages have set up tents. There are only enough tents for a few staff people and older children. We can see that most of the little ones are out beneath some trees in playpens.
As we hop out of our vehicle, we can hear the children whimpering like little kittens. The sun is so hot and full it’s blinding. The smell of hot grass and child vomit fill the air. We run up as if we are about to push a child past an oncoming train. And then we just stop. The caretakers had covered the playpens with mattresses to block the sun. The heat is trapped inside and the children are withering. I’ve never met such quiet children. There is not enough food or water at this place, either. Susette’s face turns completely cold and she stands at a distance as I walk among the playpens. I push the mattresses aside more than once and a flash of hot air moves in. Flies land on one boy’s eyelid. He is too weak to wave them away A girl struggles to roll over. She is maybe five.
I stop at some boys who look to be about two. I know boys this age. I’ve had boys this age. Their eyes are missing something. There is no white, just red. The lashes droop as if they are a great weight. Their lips are so dry they blend in with the skin around them. There is no moisture in their skin; not enough water inside them to sweat in the ninety-degree heat. I touch their heads, one by one. The tight little Afro on one boy traps dirt like a bird’s nest.
One bald kid has tiny blue veins tracing along his skull like a road map. He rises up suddenly to meet me. I kneel down to meet him. He can barely lift the weight of his dirty diaper. He stands like a drunk. I stroke his back a few times and he falls forward against the railing. His head tilts toward me. His mouth is half open. I look into his eyes and see nothing. I stop. I begin to stand up and move away The boy suddenly cries out. He has just enough tears left to drop some for me. His tiny chest heaves. His head wobbles unsteadily on his neck. I fall back. “Don’t cry. Don’t cry,” I beg him. He has no reaction.
Then suddenly I just can’t take it. The heat inside me rises as rapidly as the heat around me beats down on my head. A swell of emotion settles in my head and I just completely lose it. I begin to cry, too. Our foreheads touch. His is dry. Mine is moist. We are both so hot. His little body trembles. My spine collapses so my back is in a hunch. Some of these children will die this week. Some of these little black children in playpens on this terribly beaten island will die. They will die in the heat. They will die alone. They will wither away whether I do a story about them or not. They will be overcome regardless of whether the word gets out that they need help. They were barely better off before the ground shook, before a legion of rescue workers and journalists descended on their homeland for the umpteenth time in history to tell the story of Haiti’s woes. His agony overwhelms me. I can do nothing for this boy. Nothing right now. Nothing tomorrow. Nothing at all, nothing but cry
I finally let go of this child. The eyes of my colleagues are fixed on me. Susette stands a few feet away and waits. “Jesus, there is so much sadness in this country,” I tell her. “How do you do this? How do you go on?”
Susette becomes the first of several people in Haiti who tell me the starfish story The story is adapted from the works of Loren Eiseley, an American philosopher who wrote many books that were contemplative and humane. His essay “The Star Thrower” is treasured by people who do relief work, whose lives are a mission to help the less fortunate. A man is walking on a beach full of starfish perishing in the sun as the tide rolls out. He comes upon a boy who is throwing them back in the ocean one by one. The man asks the boy why he is bothering with the dying starfish when there are so many of them and he could never save them all.
“It doesn’t matter,” the man tells him. “It matters to the one,” replies the boy.
Susette and Bill take enormous comfort from that story, from narrowing their vision to the group of desperate boys and girls they can rescue in the face of this enormous tragedy. We return to the orphanage at dusk, a vast complex of white plaster and concrete lit by the glow of a generator’s lamp. The children are clustering even closer to the adults and some of the volunteers are singing and praying with them. As soon as we enter, a group of them surrounds us once again. It is amazing how children can smile even when they are scared.
Susette has a very firm idea of why she is in Haiti. It’s to raise these beautiful kids. She doesn’t process adoptions, even though she is supportive of the concept and is adopting two kids herself. Hers is a lifetime commitment. She says early on some of the boys told her she would leave the moment things got hard. Her promise that she would never do that has intensified her devotion. Bill and she barely interact since they are so busy, but their movements are coordinated like some kind of machine with lots of moving parts. Bill begins playing music and trying to lift the children’s spirits for what will surely be a night of more aftershocks.
I ask a group of the older ones what they think of the rush to get kids to the United States for adoption. Their English is terrific considering they are learning it here. These children love their orphanage and the Manasseros, so the question is awkward. No one wants to say they don’t want to be adopted, because they have no idea why this lady with the TV cameras is bothering to ask. But a few talk of rebuilding Haiti, of being here to help each other out. There are some dreams of escaping the poverty and destruction around them. Then they all begin to talk of adoption with a sadness that is heartbreaking.
“Everything here is destroyed. There is nothing for us. I would miss my family, but they would be happy for me,” says a boy into the approaching darkness. “But it would make me sad.”
As our evening wraps up, Bill comes charging in with a group of newcomers. They are Christian missionaries who flew themselves into the Dominican Republic, rented trucks and bought food and water, and have arrived at the Lighthouse bringing hope. They do not even know the Manasseros. They had no plan, no government behind them, nothing but a desire to go help. Everyone hugs and cheers and Susette turns to me—and if I am not mistaken, she is gloating. “Miracles do happen,” she says. “See, they’ve heard the starfish story, too.” They begin to unload the
truck of supplies into their basement as the children sing “Hallelujah” into the hot Haitian night.
We wake up to more aftershocks every few hours that night, sending us into the parking lot each time, exhausted and shaken. The food is making us sick so we’re relying on the PowerBars now. I have never had so much bottled water to drink. We spent most of last night filing stories and sending pictures. A massive telethon for Haiti is being simulcast and we are contributing footage. Anderson and Sanjay are both prominently featured, and they are fighting to pick up a fourth wind to make it good.
I am sitting with everyone at the hotel bar eating toast when Reverend Jackson appears out of nowhere, flown in by a private plane. He greets everyone, but none of us has the energy to report a story about anything beyond the disaster. Sanjay and I glance at each other with knowing looks. As hard as it was to get into Haiti, there is no easy way out. The airports are closed and the roads require cars and gas and guts. The aftershocks have put us in a constant state of fear. Reverend Jackson has a plane, our eyes say to each other. How tempting to ask for a lift! But we are staying. Sanjay has been up half the night attending to a woman brought injured into the hotel—not his job to do as a journalist but not one he can push away as a doctor. I am focused on the orphans. Anderson has witnessed the latest of several harrowing rescues of people pinned beneath the rubble. We are reporting an extraordinary story of human tragedy The sadness in this town is overwhelming.
The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities Page 22