This morning, David, Kumar, Joe, Jon, Pradel and I drove to our rented OBI warehouse across the street from the Port-au-Prince airport. Our local team of 12 Haitian workers and drivers were there, all wearing OBI T-shirts. While a team rolled out and sliced bright blue USAID tarps into family size 10’ X 20’ pieces, we loaded the big green truck with emergency relief packages (hygiene kits, meals-ready-to-eat, rice, canned fish & cereal) and 10,828 half liter bottles of water from Iceland. David, Pradel and I then took off in the Land Cruiser with the green truck following, and rendezvoused with a van full of Israeli doctors and their medicine. We picked up Valentin Abe, our partner from the fish farm and drove to Medan Belize, a tiny village located on the shore of Lake Azuei.

The lake, approximately 22,000 acres, is Haiti’s largest, but the water is 13 parts per thousand salty and supports little fish life. It’s too salty for us to utilize a WMI water purifier so the village depends on a weekly water truck delivery sponsored by our friend Val. The water truck had not been there since before the quake. The ground, for miles around the lake, is poisoned with salt, so little vegetation grows from the rocky barren soil and farming is not possible. Medan Belize is the village where our friend Prophet lives (click here to watch video), and where we are sponsoring a tilapia raising program.

The last several miles are over an extremely rough trail that cannot be described as a road. It’s a narrow path, barley wide enough for a truck, carved between thorny bushes and studded with jagged rocks. David said the scene, with Lake Azuei sparkling below, reminded him of the Dead Sea and rugged terrain found in Israel. The heavily laden truck groaned along behind us and finally blew a rear tire and bent the rim. At times I thought it might tip over, but it didn’t. When we got close to the lake, a villager sitting on a small red horse with an oozing eye infection was waiting to direct us to an alternate route; an even rougher trail. The last section of regular “road,” runs along the shore, but was flooded due to the steadily rising lake level. It hasn’t rained a drop since the first week in December so I asked Val why the lake was rising. He said that theories and superstition abound, but the consensus is, that the quake opened a new crack between the bottom of the lake and the not-too-distant sea.

Medan Belize’s 45 families were ecstatic to see us as we rolled in. We exchanged handshakes and hugs with the men we knew from previous visits. The women were smiling and the children gathered around us. Little girls in colorful dresses, clearly worn for our benefit, beamed and held their dresses out to each side as if to say, “Did you see my pretty dress?” The village had not been directly damaged by the quake, but supply lines had been cut off, and they were hurting.

The Israeli doctors picked a shady spot under a thorn tree and set up a makeshift clinic with several white plastic chairs, a crude wooden table and cardboard boxes of medicine. Val got on David’s megaphone and explained that the doctors would see anyone who needed medical attention. At first the villagers were shy. No doctors had visited the village for a year, so we knew there was plenty of need. A small boy showed me an open wound on his hand and I led him to one of the plastic chairs in front of the doctors. That started a stream of patients that kept coming for three or four hours. The doctors were wonderful – unfazed by the heat and primitive conditions.

Val had all the family names handwritten on a list and started calling each name, one by one, to receive their packages off the back of the truck. When we finished, we gave each family a heavy plastic tarp and a case of water. It was orderly until people from another village showed up, and the situation became a bit unruly. I was in the truck handing down cases of water. The pleading eyes and outreached hands were a scene of desperation that will be forever etched into the deepest part of my memory.

After the distribution was complete and all villagers requiring medical help were served by the doctors, we left and drove to Balan to check on our WMI water plant that the OB team installed two days ago. The unit is situated near a bridge that crosses a small pool in a muddy stream. While we were there, donkeys waded into the water to drink and several children took a bath. The WMI unit turned the chocolate-colored water crystal clear.

We left the doctors in Balan and rushed back to Port-au-Prince for an appointment with our lawyer and the homeowner we are trying to buy a house from. We need a base of operations where our team can sleep, shower and rest in relative comfort and safety. We met our lawyer alongside the road in front of the US embassy. US Marines dressed in camouflage fatigues and floppy hats shooed us away saying we couldn’t stop there. We moved to a busy service station parking lot and had a meeting in the Land Cruiser. The lawyer doesn’t speak English, but between David’s French and Pradel’s Creole, we formulated our game plan and went to the property to meet with the homeowner. We hammered out a deal acceptable to all. Tomorrow we are meeting the lawyer and seller and will go to the “notary” to confirm the property records, make sure all is well with the title, and complete the transaction.

We are thrilled with this development. The upstairs of the brand new five bedroom home will serve as the living quarters for our Haiti national director, Eric Lotz, and his family. The lower floor will be OB Haiti’s main office. There’s a two story guesthouse behind the main house with six bedrooms, each with its own bath. That will function as quarters for our American staff as they cycle in and out over the next couple years and also serve as a guest house when we have visitors. There is ample room to park our three trucks and two SUVs inside the gate and within the walls. The neighborhood is quiet with the US Embassy a few blocks away, but in order to insure safety we will hire 24/7 security. This was a real find and incredible buy in the face of sharply escalating prices for homes and buildings stout enough to have withstood the terrible quake.

While we were meeting with the homeowner, Kumar, Joe and some of the warehouse team took a truckload of valuable medicine to the General Hospital. The medicine was flown in from Canada on a jet piloted by a guy from Rome, Italy. Once again, OBI took the medicine “the last tactical mile” and got them into the hands of the doctors at the biggest hospital in Haiti.

Joe’s son, Jon, is a retired US Navy Seabee who runs our warehouse and is a critical link with the military and Mission Aviation Fellowship. He spent the day shuttling shipments of beans, rice and medicine from the airport to our warehouse. It was a very good day.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Bill Horan, Caribbean, Disaster Relief, Earthquake, Haiti. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.