Help Haiti

Help Haiti
Tomas Loewy, Photographer, Florida

Life in Miami is characterized by beaches, sun, entertainment, fashion and nightlife… the life of Tomas Loewy shares these attributes. Unfortunately, the island of Haiti suffered an earthquake last week and thousands of people needed help. As Tomas says, Haiti is in many respects closely related to Miami, so when he and his friends were given an opportunity to fly to devastated capital Porte-au-Prince, he didn’t hesitate. His camera lens captured the atmosphere of the destroyed city and the suffering of its inhabitants, as well as the work of the paramedics and volunteers who were doing their best to help. You have a great opportunity to read his reportage, words about a journey which was definitely engraved into Tomas' memory forever.

Living in Miami Haiti is very close. Geographically and personally. Many of us have personal Haitian friends, one of the most beautiful and charming models I work with is Haitian; one of the greatest news photographers for the Miami Herald is Haitian, an underground DJ friend, a nightclub promoter, etc. And that is just in my personal world without even thinking twice who is Haitian and who is not... Plus all those Haitians we don't know but hear when they chat in Creole while scanning items at the supermarket. No corporate American rule is ever able to completely stop the joy of life, the smiles our Haitian friends and co-workers show, even when life often is not as rosy as they make it seem. There is a big part of Miami which is called Little Haiti, molded on the tight knit Cuban community known as Little Havana.

Which is why it felt like part of our own Miamian world had come crashing down when the earth shook on January 12 destroying all we saw destroyed on TV. A couple of my personal group of friends took the initiative. The earthquake was on a Tuesday. Wednesday evening Dirk had organized a big truck from a friend who "just had one available", found a place to park it in a convenient location in Miami Beach's South Beach and put a status update on Facebook. Something like: "Have truck for Haiti relief. a) bring donations. b) come help sort & load". The first truck was filled in 5 hours. This is a group of professionals where everyone knows someone. So the next step (I don't know myself whose contact this is) was that there was a recipient for all our donations, Project Medishare.

A project started some 20 years ago by Dr. Barth Green from the University of Miami's Medical School and Hospital. Project Medishare was one of the first organizations on the ground because... it already was helping in Haiti for many years. They could use help and supplies (food, water, donations). Add to this the contact to a private business jet charter company, Turnberry Aviation at a beautiful executive airport in North Miami, and suddenly you have transportation of goods (and then people) to Port Au Prince, when almost nobody could fly in those first days after the quake.

Our "1st & Alton" group (called after the street names where the truck was parked) filled ten trucks in five days, had them flown to Haiti and then some of the most compassionate people signed up as volunteers to help set up medical relief and start building a big new field hospital, set up on vacant land in the northwest corner of Port-au-Prince’s international airport.

So from one day to another, from accepting donations (and you should have been on that corner of 1st & Alton to see the outpouring of practical help and donations from humble on one side to the young businessman who pulled up impeccably dressed in his brand new Jaguar and emptied his trunk with lots of just-bought food) there was a group going to help with that hospital in Haiti.

From one day (Monday) to another, from photographing the premiere of a big Cirque du Soleil derivative show on Tuesday with 50 beautiful horses (amazing! Cavalia!) and preparing a fashion show I was hosting and co-designing Saturday night I had the chance not only to help load the planes at the private airport on Wednesday (that day in the evening photographing (my own) mini fashion showing for a fashion industry networker), but to fly out on Thursday on 60 minute notice.

The idea was to help the doctors set up a system and photographing patients and their wounds, etc. The new hospital being built in front of our eyes and with the help of my friends from "1st & Alton" houses a medical staff of over 100, including two operating rooms. The hospital is formed out of four tents that retired Miami Heat basketball star Alonzo Mourning arranged to have donated by a party-planning company. Project Medishare assists over 300 patients right away, and patients kept pouring in, brought in on flatbed trucks, taxis, carried by their relatives directly out of the rubble of their collapsed houses.

With Mauricio, an Israeli-American surgeon who works at the University of Miami's Hospital and has great experience in planning emergency medical relief situations (and whom I met because he had a bag of bagels and cream cheese and shared with me), his 21 year old son Barak (a law student in Miami) and an ambulance (if you can call a delivery truck used as such an ambulance) we transported a patient who had had a miscarriage and was in very bad shape to the Israeli field hospital on the other side of Port Au Prince. The Israelis are better prepared for immediate emergencies and catastrophes. As the chief surgeon there told us they were in the air just four hours after the earthquake happened, set up in six hours after landing, everything being prepared and ready to go, and had been operating just 24 hours after the earthquake happened - coming from Tel Aviv!

Amazing how perfect the Israelis were set up. The patient is photographed lying on the stretcher with a tablet device (as you see), data is then immediately available wirelessly in all computers set up all over the field hospital. There is a tent labeled “Imaging”, there are incubators with tiny prematurely born babies, etc, etc. Little can trump preparedness, training for emergencies and professionalism. The - relative - calm there was amazing, even - or especially - in a catastrophic situation efficiency and calm make a hospital function better.

We drove back through the devastated downtown of Port-Au-Prince to get patients next to the also crumbled cathedral. The images you see from photographers and video crews dedicated only to capturing that are better than mine, so I just tried to capture the general atmosphere. People wandering around in the heat (it is over 90F/33C during the day in the merciless sun), searching for food and water; hands sticking out of collapsed buildings; but also traffic jams full of agile motorcycles and overloaded colorful mini-buses.

Back at the Project Medishare over one hundred doctors and nurses, highly trained professionals, are giving their time, compassion, effort to do what they can. They took vacation time to rush to Haiti right away, working 16 hour shifts, then sleeping of exhaustion on a cot in a 200 person tent. It was amazing to meet some of my own personal doctor friends there, with a smile of doing whatever they can on their face. One of the tents is for children. On one hand the cries of wounded, suffering kids was heartbreaking, on the other hand those kids outside in the sun immediately found makeshift toys to play with. Children's beautiful smiles combined with other kid's cries. Not easy to say the least, but life is about the next day.

It was not planned that way but I came back Saturday night at 11 in the evening (Haiti is less than 2 hours flying time from Miami). It just happened that someone came into that big sleeping tent for 200 doctors, nurses and helpers at 7:30 saying that a big plane might leave "right now". Not that that was a reliable information, nobody really knew, I had slept on the tarmac of the airport the night before after not being allowed on a flight because of absurd bureaucratic procedures; trying to sleep a bit, just literally 20 meters from the infernal noise of US Army's C-130 and Hercules planes landing and taking off all night).

Somehow a group of 20 people got to the airport (the Project Medishare hospital is one mile from the runway on airport grounds) and there it was. A Boeing 737 with friendly guys taking names and passport numbers. Nothing is sure until you are in the air, the previous night I had been on a plane already before being kicked out, others had to throw a coin to determine who would have to stay behind, etc. But this "Vision Air" 737 (yes, there is such a - charter - airline, they normally fly from Miami to ... Havana, Cuba!) took off. My seat neighbor, a Peruvian-American doctor happily planning not to call her husband and surprise him by just getting home researched of who had paid for the plane to fly. (Although we all forget, someone has to put up the funds...). Guess who? This 737 was chartered (and paid for) by ... the Church of Scientology (as a critic of their ways I have to admit that there were amazing Scientology "Volunteer Ministers" helpers on the ground). They were flying out orphans to Miami. So, thank you, Tom Cruise.

Landing in Miami at 11 that evening I realized I could do one more crazy thing, which I was never planning to do: attend my own (the models have paper/postcard based dresses with my art/canvases as part of the dresses) fashion show at a big trendy luxury night club in a posh hotel. Obviously that had been planned many weeks ahead. It was not relevant to me to miss it obviously, but being back in Miami two hours before the show was to start I decided to surprise my fashion partner Julia and just show up... The fashion show was at 1 in the morning, technically on Sunday, so that's where this crazy week ends.

So I went dirty, unshaven, smelly into this high level nightclub at the Gansevoort South hotel. Trust me I was surprised myself that the doormen even let me in, although technically and on the invitations to the show I was not only part of it. Officially I was the host of this show...

Yes, life is rather cruel and has many facettes. You do what you can and let it affect you in your spare time.

If interested see the full set of photos on my photo site www.coolpoolevents.com or see video at www.youtube.com/coolpoolmedia.

Weeks of Tomas Loewy