Outside we continued our tour and before long we bumped into some of the gang leaders, including the dreadlocked, sunglass-wearing, ultimate leader of all the gangs, who talked earnestly to Father Tom in Creole. Eventually Father Tom said something to him which made him laugh loudly and all the young men round him followed suit. As we walked on Father Tom explained to us that he was trying to persuade the gang leaders to hand over their weapons and negotiate an agreement with the government and the UN. He was exasperated because last week President Preval had a secret meeting with them, after which some of the more naive gang members had talked to the press, claiming the president was being forced to accommodate their views. Headlines embarrassing the president resulted, and Father Tom was now telling these gang members that they needed to make some kind of gesture to repair the damage. He feared it might be too late and worried that the UN were perhaps preparing to mount an invasion that would result in a huge loss of life. The relationship between these gang leaders and Father Tom was an interesting one. During our few days with him, they phoned him constantly asking for his advice. They had a very obvious respect for him, the man who almost alone was feeding and educating the starving children of their territory. For his part Father Tom knew his relationship with them was vital in order to be allowed to work here, while it was equally important not to get too drawn into their web. He was walking a moral tightrope: trying to retain their permission to work here while not vindicating their methods of leadership. He explained to us quietly that a few weeks ago a man had thrust a gun through his window as he parked his car in Cité Soleil, demanding he take the keys from the ignition and hand them over. He managed to escape because the man turned away for a moment, not realizing that Father Tom had another set of keys in his pocket which he inserted in the ignition before speeding off. To Father Tom’s horror, he learnt later that the people here had been so angry when they heard of what had happened that they killed the man responsible.
The leader of the gang that controlled the wharf area offered to show us around his patch. This was an important part of Cité Soleil, given the fact that Haiti is a transit point for drugs being smuggled from South America to the US by boat and that the gangs were probably heavily involved in this industry. He was perhaps thirty years old, small and dressed in a scruffy T-shirt. He was hardly intimidating and I wondered how he managed to rise to the position of gang leader. He walked with us around the hovels standing among the mounds of rubbish and pointed pitifully at the most emaciated children who surrounded us. I asked him what could make things better here. He pointed at Father Tom and said, ‘food and school for our children’. Father Tom noticed that I was filming this little compliment and for the camera pretended to punch him on the chin in slow motion.
By now I knew that Father Tom was anything but mad. Eccentric, hilarious, courageous, reckless maybe, but certainly not mad.
As we walked back, Father Tom pointed out two men working on a flat rooftop and encouraged me to climb up to witness what they were doing. I’m glad I did, because if I hadn’t I would never have believed it. In neat rows they were laying out little cakes made of mud to dry in the baking sun. Into the mud they were mixing a little margarine and salt. In Creole these mud cakes are known as ‘terre’ and traditionally are eaten by pregnant Haitian women in the belief that they contain minerals that are good for their unborn children. Now, though, it was not just expectant mothers who ate these cakes. The producers of ‘terre’ were perhaps part of the only growth industry in Cité Soleil as people took desperate measures to fill their empty stomachs. The people of Cité Soleil had been reduced to eating mud.
Later that evening we said a rosary together on the roof of Father Tom’s house, from which we could see Cité Soleil about 2 miles away. As we prayed, we could see the rockets and hear the dull explosions as the UN troops once again attacked the gangs. Father Tom wearily made some calls to organize for his ambulance to go down and park nearby. He had earlier shown us the fully equipped surgery he had set up in his house, the workplace of a surgeon who had become a specialist in gunshot wounds.
By now I knew that Haiti would be an extremely difficult place for us to work. Without a secure safe environment or even the availability of locally grown food it would not always be possible to implement our ideal model. But I had no doubt that this was somewhere we should be providing Mary’s Meals, even if we had to make some compromises. While it was always our strong preference to buy food grown in-country, it was very clear that the children here would not complain if we needed to import their rice at this stage. Before leaving Haiti we agreed with Father Tom that we would begin providing the 4,500 meals he needed every school day for his pupils. He was overjoyed.
But I had another task before heading home. I had made this pledge without yet having secured the funding from the Foundation in the Cayman Islands. I had told them what we wanted to do in Haiti, including the support for 4,500 children in Cité Soleil, and while they had made encouraging noises they had not yet made any promises. So from Haiti I travelled to the Cayman Islands to make a presentation to the board of the Foundation and to seek their support. They were based in surroundings that could not have been more different from those I had just left behind in Haiti. In their offices hung expensive art and the men I was invited to speak to were smartly dressed gentlemen who I found hard to read, and they seemed devoid of emotion as I made my presentation. I explained what I had just seen in Haiti and our plan. I described to them the experience of seeing the first Mary’s Meals served in Haiti and, for some reason, mentioned the encounter with the Missionaries of Charity and the fact that those meals were served on the anniversary of Mother Teresa’s death. To my great surprise they looked startled and moved by this piece of information. I finished my presentation and asked them for the large sum of money we required to provide all those daily school meals for the next year. After some probing questions they eventually, to my enormous relief, said yes. I thanked them profusely and asked them about their reaction to my story of Mother Teresa.
They explained to me that all the funding that their Foundation had at its disposal was donated by one wealthy lady. Three years previously she had had a vivid dream in which Mother Teresa appeared to her and asked her to feed her children in Haiti. This dream had such an impact on her it led her to provide the funding to the Foundation. Mary’s Meals in Haiti was the first project they had ever funded in fulfilment of that request. Sometimes I felt God just wanted to remind us who was setting the strategy. Certainly I have never doubted in the years since that we were meant to be in Haiti and do our best to see more children fed, no matter how difficult that might be.
And certainly there has been no shortage of difficulties. By the time the earthquake struck on 12 January 2010, 12,000 children in Haiti were eating Mary’s Meals every school day. A few hours before the earthquake I was on the phone to Father Tom and Doug Campbell, who called me from Miami Airport on their way back to Port-au-Prince from the US. We were confirming a plan to begin feeding the ‘barefoot kids’ – the children on the streets of Cité Soleil – after regular school classes had finished, and to begin introducing them to basic education. Father Tom, whose idea this was, was excited to tell me they were ready to begin the next day. A few hours later I heard the news of the earthquake and my heart sank. Unable to contact them, we called their families in the USA to learn that their house had collapsed on top of them, killing two young men who lived there, but that Father Tom and Doug were alive. But all the phones were by now down and no contact was possible. For the next two or three days, as the media reported to us the unprecedented scale of the disaster and the horrors that were unfolding in and around Port-au-Prince, Doug’s family were beside themselves with fear about what had become of them. By now we had launched a full-scale appeal, working through the night to get word out to our supporters and through the media, and almost instantly we began to receive a tidal wave of donations. Meanwhile, I was trying with the help of my friends in Miami
to find a way into Haiti. With no scheduled flights operating, there was an enormous demand on small charter planes but eventually we managed to book one. I began my journey to Miami and between flights in New York I received some good news and some bad news. First, to my huge relief, I spoke to Doug Campbell who explained that he and Father Tom had managed to get out of Haiti via the Dominican Republic – but having licked their wounds and hugged their loved ones, they were now determined to get back in as quickly as possible and wanted me to come with them to help. However, I also received a call from our friend and founding board member Albert Holder, in Miami, to say the charter plane arrangement had fallen through but he was desperately trying to find another option. I decided to go on to Miami anyway, and by the time I arrived at Albert’s house I had heard of an unlikely breakthrough with some distant connections arranging for two seats on a flight if we turned up at the airport the next day – as long as we never ever revealed any details!
And so it was that we landed in Haiti four days after the earthquake, on our mysteriously arranged flight. Much of the terminal building had collapsed and we walked straight from the runway out on to the streets, which were swarming with people, among them many children begging for food. On the pavements and central reservations of busy roads, under the canopies of abandoned filling stations and beside the remains of their homes, hundreds of thousands were trying to find somewhere to sleep. Everywhere was rubble and twisted debris. Huge cracks ran through the squint walls of buildings that looked about to topple over at any moment, the president’s palace looked like a pathetic smashed wedding cake, and the broken cathedral’s roof lay mangled where the congregation used to sit.
Entering Father Tom Hagan’s little courtyard from the dark, devastated city, I was struck by a sense of order and calm. His two-storey house had been reduced to a remarkably small pile of rubble. The courtyard was now a temporary home for some of the Hands Together staff and neighbouring families. In one corner a makeshift shelter of tin and tarpaulin had been erected to act as the new head office of Hands Together. Outside in the yard, people were settling down to sleep despite the incessant roar of planes and helicopters flying in and out of Port-au-Prince. Some families were sleeping in an old minibus and truck parked in the corner of the yard. Beside the shelter Father Tom had created a little ‘chapel’ out of things salvaged from his ruined house – a rocking chair, a smashed crucifix, a little statue of Our Lady and a picture of the two seminarians who died beneath the broken concrete. Their graves, marked by simple wooden crosses, were a few yards away. We gathered to pray at the chapel before settling down on the hard dusty yard, under our blankets, to try and get some sleep.
The night was punctuated by sporadic gunfire from surrounding streets, as well as people’s screams, moans and angry shouting. I was acutely aware that one of the four walls of this previously secure compound no longer stood to protect us. At one point a dog nuzzled me and curled up to sleep at my feet, and for a while I did too.
The next morning we travelled down into nearby Cité Soleil with some of the Hands Together team. Many of them had lost family members. The wife and daughter of Nelson, the Hands Together general manager, had been killed by their collapsed house, and I was amazed that he seemed able to concentrate on the work that needed doing. Our grim and emotional tour of the schools revealed that each had been damaged, perhaps beyond repair. Some of the team, strong macho men who had grown up among the gangs in Cité Soleil, broke down and cried for the first time in my sight, when they saw the state of the schools they had helped build. Children who usually benefited from our daily meals were sitting outside among the debris, but the dangerous cracked buildings were deserted. As we picked our way carefully through St Francis de Sales School towards the kitchen, the stench became unbearable and I braced myself for what horror we might find there. I was hugely relieved to find only a large pot of rotting beans. Outside we met Vaneesa and Marie, two local Mary’s Meals cooks. They explained that they ‘had been up to their elbows in those beans’, cooking Mary’s Meals for the following day, when the ground began to shake, but that they had managed to crawl to safety. They showed us their scraped arms and legs.
In many ways the lives of people in Cité Soleil had been affected less dramatically than others in the city. Most here were already without enough daily food, and water. Already here many children died of hunger-related causes each week. They had no running water or sanitation in the first place. And homes made of flimsy tin are less likely to kill you when they collapse. But the need for aid was still desperate indeed, and the insecurity in Cité Soleil meant that most agencies could not set up an effective way to help.
Back in Father Tom’s little compound we had a meeting with the teachers and community leaders, who had been living on the streets since the earthquake. One team was tasked with making an immediate assessment of needs in each school community; who had died, who had lost their house, what were people’s current situations? Another team was to begin picking out reusable bricks from the debris around each school. As soon as possible they would rebuild the school campus walls in order to create secure bases to resume an effective food distribution programme. Meanwhile the water tanker truck used each day by Hands Together to bring clean water to the people of Cité Soleil was filled up and ready to begin distribution again. And even while we talked some men were already rebuilding the collapsed compound wall and a group of women were cooking a pot of rice for our evening meal.
As we talked, Doug realized that unless we could get a fuel supply very little would be possible. He and I sped down to the huge UN tented city that had formed near the airport, where many of the NGO workers were based. We began asking for fuel – even just one large barrel – and were passed from office to office. No one seemed to want to take responsibility for giving us what we urgently needed, despite accepting that we represented an organization that had a very legitimate need for this and admitting that they had a huge supply of fuel in store. One young man from Sweden pointed at a nearby marquee and said we should join a co-ordination meeting that various NGOs were having. We noticed very quickly that there was not one black face in the crowded tent, and as we listened it became clear most of them had only just arrived in Haiti. I couldn’t help but make a comparison with the meeting we had just had in Father Tom’s yard. After some time a man stood up and introduced himself as belonging to a very well-known global NGO. He talked at length about the poor accommodation that he and his colleagues had been provided. He was indignant about this and some others began to raise their voices in support. Doug and I looked at each other. I was genuinely concerned that he was going to hit somebody. While a lively debate about their accommodation continued we walked out of the tent, straight over to the depot where we could see barrels of fuel stacked high, and told the startled man in the stockroom that we needed one right now, and could he please have it placed immediately in the back of our pickup as we were in a big hurry. He didn’t even put up an argument and a few minutes later we were heading back through the pitiful streets with our precious cargo.
I learnt a lot from working with Father Tom and Doug. In the days after the earthquake they began to speak a lot about ‘humility in action’ as a guide to our decision-making and approach; an emphasis on remembering how very small we are in a situation like this and the importance of recognizing what we could and could not do. It gave us a focus and allowed us to do some things very well in extremely difficult circumstances. But it was not just their words that taught me things. On a visit six months later, after they had rebuilt some temporary accommodation at their compound for the team, I noticed that Father Tom was still sleeping in a one-man tent in the compound. I asked him why he hadn’t moved into the accommodation where there were proper beds.
‘Today there are hundreds of thousands of Haitians still sleeping in pathetic tents. It is a scandal. And as long as they have to do that, then so will I – and anyway, I quite like it actually,’ he laughed.
In al
l we were donated £1.3 million for our emergency appeal for Haiti. Within two months of the earthquake, temporary classrooms had been built and all of the children were once again receiving a daily meal. The next phase became the repair and rebuilding of the damaged schools. Within a year we had spent all of the money raised and the amazing Hands Together operation was up and running once again. We were able to account for and report to our donors on every pound spent. And then we resumed our day job, working to bring daily meals to more hungry children in Haiti. In fact, even by the end of that year after the earthquake, the number of children receiving Mary’s Meals in Haiti had risen from 12,000 to 15,000. Again I saw what was possible when we worked in the right way with local communities, and repeatedly I was humbled by the spirit of the Haitian people and their resilience.
I eventually found my way out of Haiti after the earthquake by hitching a ride with a small cargo plane that we had chartered to transport a precious consignment of urgently needed medicine into Hinche from Miami. The evening before I departed we sat round the outdoor chapel, once again in the dark. Father Tom saw me looking at his mangled crucifix hanging on the tree. The plaster figure of Jesus had been smashed and wires protruded from the broken plaster limbs. He explained that this was his family’s crucifix, which had hung in his house in Philadelphia as he grew up. After he became a priest he had always kept it in his home and so was delighted when it was salvaged from the rubble of his fallen house here.
‘I won’t ever repair it. I will keep it just like this,’ he says. ‘It reminds us that Jesus is broken too, with us.’
The Shed That Fed a Million Children Page 23