HAITI

AUGUST 2021

Following the 2021 earthquake, WCK set up two kitchens on the island—one in Les Cayes and another in Jeremie. We also established an outpost in the capital, Port-au-Prince, at the airport. That’s where I was stationed. My job was to buy as much food as possible and fly it to the other cities. With roads and bridges destroyed, overland transport was impossible.

One of our board members lives in Haiti on a secured compound, so accommodations were safe—though the city was another story. Haiti was my first experience in the developing world. The first thing that struck me was the burning piles of trash in the streets that no one seemed to notice. There was garbage everywhere, sometimes literally on fire.

The work was intense. There weren’t enough aircraft—planes or helicopters—to move the food we needed. We had a couple of Cessnas and a Sikorsky helicopter, but it wasn’t enough. The U.S. Marines were also stationed at the airport, having been deployed to assist in the crisis, but they were preparing to leave. I asked if we could use some of their aircraft to move the backlog of pallets waiting at the airport. The next day, I somehow found myself in command of a fleet: three Ospreys (four pallets each) and a Chinook helicopter (ten pallets). For that day, they did whatever I asked—loaded whatever I wanted, flew wherever I told them, landed however I requested, as many times as I needed.

I joined one Osprey on a run to Jeremie. The airstrip looked straight out of Jurassic Park—this was no Heathrow. It was also a crash course in American military power. Local officials tried to direct the aircraft, but the Marines operated on their own protocols, as if this were enemy territory. They chose where and how to land without asking permission. At one point, I asked the pilot to lift the Osprey, rotate it 90 degrees for easier unloading, and set it down again—a maneuver that probably cost a few hundred taxpayer dollars in jet fuel. It’s quite a feeling, directing a $75 million aircraft like that.

Once on the ground, the Marines moved fast. One woman immediately took position at the fence, where a growing crowd of hungry Haitians had gathered. Their orders were simple: deliver the pallets and leave. They kicked the cargo out the back and were airborne again in minutes.

That left me and five Haitian team members frantically loading a truck in the middle of a jungle airstrip, with a crowd threatening—my translator confirmed—to jump the fence with machetes to claim the food. It was a harrowing moment. But nothing happened. We got the truck loaded and on its way to the kitchen, and I caught a ride back on one of our Cessnas.

There was also the saga of the limes, which is still referenced to this day. I thought I was ordering 10,000 limes (which is still a lot of limes), but I was actually ordering 10,000LBS of limes, which was an incredibly larger amount of limes. These are the green bags below. Those two photos are two separate piles of limes. Also Sean Penn was hanging out with us.