My journey began by taking two flights on Spirit Airlines from LaGuardia Airport to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, followed by a six-hour ride through the countryside in an old pickup truck. The car ride was calm and scenic, passing through small towns and farmland. Once at the Haitian border you could feel the tension and desperation in the air. The dusty checkpoints and offices were filled with aggressive con artists posing as border workers who preyed on aid workers and journalists. Military convoys backed up traffic for miles.
I arrived three weeks after the first quake and aid had just started to come into Port-au-Prince at a steady rate. The problem is that there is no real governmental plan on how to cope with the situation. Architecturally speaking, Port-au-Prince is structurally unsafe. Buildings continued to collapse, causing additional casualties. Unsanitary conditions on the streets were causing disease to spread. There was a much-needed United Nations and U.S. military presence in the country, mainly to control food distribution. The Haitian police are mobilized, but overwhelmed by the severity of the situation, and often make decisions that harm their people.
A major problem facing Haiti is how to organize the placement of orphans left behind by the quake. Before the quake, there were 380,000 orphans in this country of 9 million. Since the disaster this number has increased to an undetermined amount. Due to the country's poverty, orphaned children tend to suffer from malnutrition and scant medical care. Medical practice is considered a business, and health insurance is nonexistent. A parent or guardian dying from the harsh realities that plague Haiti such as violence or disease generally causes children's abandonment. Other parents feel they have no choice but to abandon their children for financial reasons.
Prior to leaving for Haiti I arranged to stay on the grounds of a group home for orphaned children, located in Thomassin, a section of the Port-au-Prince suburb of Petionville, run by Longchamp Charities. This was possible through the help of friends and contacts. Two women, Marjorie Longchamp and Beatrice Brice, work together to keep all aspects of the operation running. Both were born in Haiti, but Longchamp immigrated to the U.S. as a youngster and now works as director of catering and special events for Elite Caterers, which is based in the Empire State Building. Longchamp provides a large portion of the funding through her earnings from the catering business, and spends her spare time co-managing the charity from New York.
Longchamp’s journey to becoming founder of the charity began as a girl growing up in Port-au-Prince. She came from a more fortunate middle-class family, but witnessing the hardships and strife of her nation made a lasting impression. “Although I was still young when I left Haiti, I was old enough to understand the distressed conditions that others my age remained in," Longchamp told me recently. "Upon leaving, I promised my mother that I would one day give back to the country she was born in." Her family later immigrated to Brooklyn.
