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The Surfer Who Swapped Waves for Humanitarian Aid

uchrobak — Tue, 06 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It was just before midnight on September 19, 2017, in the town of Christiansted, Saint Croix. ��ϳԹ�� the yellow concrete walls of the Caravelle Hotel, Hurricane Maria was hurtling toward shore with Category 5 force. Jon Rose, who had come to the area to implement water-filtration systems in communities already devastated by Hurricane Irma, seemed less alarmed than amused. Since founding his nonprofit, , eight years ago, the 39-year-old had experienced the aftermath of 19 natural disasters, but he’d never been on the ground before one of them struck.

Rose stood outside, in an open stairwell, and held up his iPhone so that he and longtime friend and fellow former pro surfer Ben Bourgeois fit in the frame. Instagram needed a video update. “We’re here,” Rose said, squinting into the wind and chuckling. “Still standing.” He panned the scene. Palm trees heaved in the distance. Heavy rain streaked through the fluorescent light of a streetlamp. In a second video, Rose led the camera into his hotel room, focusing on clumps of ceiling panels that had fallen into the puddles on the floor. “It’s all water,” he said.

The next morning, Rose and Bourgeois, along with Waves for Water’s Haiti director, Fritz Pierre-Louis, stepped outside and into an almost unrecognizable landscape. “It was like a bomb had gone off,” Bourgeois told me. “The island had lost all its green.” The damage was just as severe in Puerto Rico, where Rob McQueen, field operations director and head of the organization’s Caribbean Hurricane Relief Initiative, and his team of three were located. Almost the entire island had lost power, and more than half the population was without clean water.

Rose’s special-ops-inspired response teams began working their contacts: friends in the Caribbean surfing community, Pierre-Louis’s Rotarian connection in Saint Croix, locals willing to ignore emergency curfews to reach isolated areas. McQueen led the overall operation, which initially consisted of just eight people, from Puerto Rico. “We did everything from connecting private-plane and helicopter owners to couriers, to flying in people with water filters,” he told me. “Finding ways to get things from outside normal channels is what we do.”

Rose in Ecuador in 2016. (Dylan Gordon)

Within the first 72 hours, nearly all the 500 filters the teams had managed to pack in their checked baggage were being distributed across Saint Croix and Puerto Rico. After three weeks—as the U.S. government came under increasing fire for its ineffective disaster response in Puerto Rico, where 29 percent of the population still lacked potable water—Waves for Water had set up 3,600 filtration systems across seven islands, aiding an estimated 100,000 people. The group had even rented a 50-foot yacht, La Vagabond, to reach Dominica, 250 miles to the southeast of Saint Croix. By October 20, the Caribbean initiative was on pace to be one of Waves for Water’s most successful projects. Through partners and individual donations, it had raised nearly $300,000. Rose credited the organization’s success to its “breed of guerrilla humanitarianism.”

Last November, I met Rose at NeueHouse, a swanky co-working space off Park Avenue in Manhattan. It was just before lunch, and the palatial World War I–era building was bustling with young men and women direct from urban-creative central casting. I found Rose sitting on a window seat in front of his MacBook. One of NeueHouse’s original members is a friend, so Rose gets a discount on membership, which can run as high as $4,000 a month. “I think they like the idea of having a resident humanitarian,” he told me.

The global water crisis has grown ever more dire; 783 million people are living without access to safe water, while the average American uses about 100 gallons every day.

I’d met Rose in 2012, when he came to New York to help friends who lived in communities devastated by Hurricane Sandy. His curly dark brown hair, while still full, was now grayer. In the field, Rose always wears a pair of brown leather boots. (“It’s a psychological thing about safety. You don’t have control over anything external, but you have control over your response to it, so I’m going to wear boots.”) Now he wore high-top Vans, black jeans, and a black leather jacket over a gray hoodie. As always, he was eager to talk about Waves for Water, though his glassy blue eyes suggested that he could use some extra sleep.

A lot has happened since Sandy, when Waves for Water was barely two years old. Catastrophic floods in Brazil, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, the Nepal earthquake, Hurricane Matthew in Haiti—Rose personally responded to all of them and more. has also grown ever more dire; today nearly one in nine people, some 783 million, are living without access to safe water, while the average American every day.

Such statistics, and Waves for Water’s reputation for coming through with filters and aid in the most extreme conditions, has attracted partnerships with BMW and PayPal, as well as the United Nations and the U.S. military. Rose’s organization now raises an average of $2 million annually—not only to respond to natural disasters, but also to help people in regions where access to clean water is difficult. Rose moves fluidly around the world on a comfortable salary, split 25-75 between Waves for Water and the clothing company Hurley, which pays him as a brand ambassador. The nonprofit has ten full-time employees, including McQueen and Pierre-Louis, who work remotely from locations around the globe, and about 15 part-time employees, though that number can rise depending on funding, partnerships, and unforeseen disasters.

At NeueHouse, Rose’s iPhone wouldn’t stop buzzing with notifications. When he’s in New York, which is rarely for more than ten days at a time, he’s buried under the daily responsibilities of heading up an international nonprofit. There are phone conferences with the organization’s four directors around the world. There are potential partnerships to explore, often involving meetings with corporate suits in sparkling high-rises.

“I’m ready for a break,” Rose said, then clarified: “From a certain aspect of the work.”

Before September 30, 2009, Rose could never have imagined running a global humanitarian-aid organization. That day he was sitting on a boat moored off the city of Padang, Indonesia, just after a surf trip with friends. He was 31. He’d just retired after 13 years as a professional surfer. He and his wife, who he’d been with for eight years, were headed for divorce. Their Laguna Beach, California, condo, which Rose bought at the peak of the real estate bubble, was in foreclosure. As Rose put it, his mind was “a whole world of scrambled eggs.” And then a magnitude-7.6 earthquake hit Padang, reducing much of the city to rubble.

Rose’s father, Jack—a carpenter who started a nonprofit to help communities in Kenya and Uganda build rain-catchment systems—had encouraged his son to give back, and the trip to Indonesia seemed like the perfect opportunity. So Rose had packed ten palm-size ceramic water filters, which he intended to donate to a Balinese community he’d visited in the past. He’d even incorporated his mini-initiative, naming it Waves for Water. In Padang, however, Rose found a Red Cross center in desperate need of clean water for treating wounds, so he volunteered his filters. “I found a clarity that I hadn’t had in years, or maybe ever,” he said. “I was like, this is what I’m going to dedicate myself to.”

Less than four months later, in January 2010, Rose landed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a few days after the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere, on his first official Waves for Water disaster -response. A private donor had read a news article about Rose’s experience in Padang and offered him $40,000 to rush 4,000 water filters to Haiti. Waves for Water didn’t yet have 501(c)3 status, let alone 4,000 filters, but Rose said he’d do it anyway. He followed a ragtag group of responders to a Port-au-Prince home that had been arranged by the donor and started picking up on the lingo of the international-aid community. The “structure” had been “compromised,” so he pitched his tent in the yard. The stench of decomposing bodies hung thick in the air for weeks.

As it would be in Puerto Rico after Maria, the relief effort in Haiti was bogged down by the bureaucratic red tape of government and large NGOs, which left swaths of the disaster area totally ignored. “I was a one-man show,” Rose recalled. “I wasn’t competing against other organizations, I was competing against the crisis.” He gravitated to other independent responders, like the two paramedics from Florida who commandeered an ambulance to locate the injured and deliver them to hospitals.

When there’s a catastrophe, we don’t spend time in meetings. In two days, we are on the ground and getting to the people who are really in need.

Rose’s most important connection was Pierre-Louis, a Haitian businessman who seemed to be in possession of the only working BlackBerry in the country and who could coordinate relief to the hardest-hit neighborhoods. It was with Pierre-Louis that Rose perfected the strategy of going directly to needy communities with the filtration systems, each of which involved a filter connected to a five-gallon bucket by a tube and an adapter. (Today, Waves for Water utilizes the same system, , which contains a microfiber cartridge that can catch 99.9 percent of the common bacteria, protozoa, and cysts that cause things like cholera, botulism, typhoid, and dysentery. The filters don’t need to have their cartridges changed and can function for years.) “The difference between Waves for Water and a lot of large organizations is that when there’s a catastrophe, we don’t spend time in meetings,” Pierre-Louis told me. “In two days, we are on the ground and getting to the people who are really in need.”

Together, Rose and Pierre-Louis identified community leaders and taught them how to assemble and maintain the filter systems, to ensure that they would remain effective for years to come. This is how Waves for Water still operates today. “We remain small on purpose,” Rose told me, referring to the crisis-response teams, which rarely have more than four members. “The goal for any aid organization should be: have the least amount of international people and the most amount of nationals.”

Waves for Water is no megalith, but it’s having an impact. In eight years, Rose and his teams have distributed more than 150,000 filter systems in 44 countries, helping an estimated seven million people.

Though it’s difficult to find, there has been criticism of Rose’s go-with-anybody approach to aid work. Some people denigrate him for partnering with the U.S. military. “It’s taboo,” he said. “In the minds of some aid providers, they’re saving the world and the military is killing it.” Rose also isn’t opposed to teaming up with companies that many other nonprofits refuse to work with. “If a mining company is willing to throw down and millions of people are going to benefit, I’ll take it—I have an agenda, too.”

With the exception of Hurricane Sandy, Waves for Water hasn’t responded to any disasters in the United States, a decision that has also sparked disapproval. After deciding to sit out the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, Rose had to issue a statement. “The last thing we want to be is an ‘ambulance-chaser’ type org,” he wrote. Additionally, Waves for Water filters were not effective against the heavy metals in Flint’s water, he noted, and fixing the problem—repairing contaminated pipes—was something that the U.S. government could address.

In the remotest corners of Puerto Rico, where help from FEMA was minimal, Waves for Water’s response, led by McQueen, has been textbook guerrilla humanitarianism—and incredibly effective. Last winter, months after the hurricanes and the media attention that came with them, Waves for Water teams and their networks continued to expand their efforts. In Puerto Rico alone, over 6,000 filters had been distributed to 78 communities. Another 1,700 filters had been implemented across the Caribbean islands, and donations, most of them from individuals, surpassed $620,000.

Rose, however, was not there. He and his girlfriend, Loriann Smoak, who works for a retail tech startup, were spending the final weeks of 2017 in Colorado before signing a lease on a place in Marin County, California. After eight years of working nearly every day, Rose was taking a sabbatical. He loved New York for the “energy of its hustle,” and I wondered if—and how—he could truly unplug living in the Bay Area. “That’s the cool thing,” he said, as if on cue. “From a business-development standpoint, it’s a market we haven’t even scratched yet.”

Andrew S. Lewis () is a writer in New Jersey. He wrote about Dutch engineer Boyan Slat in January 2017. Joe Pugliese is an ��ϳԹ�� contributing photographer.

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Joyous Photos of Haiti’s First-Ever Surf Competition

nkelley — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Haiti would be a rare sight on anyone's list of surfing hotspots. Despite beautiful beaches and solid breaks, the country is better known as a poster child for the failure of international aid in the wake of two devastating natural disasters—not to mention issues of violence, disease, and endemic corruption that persist today. However, since 2010 a small group of aid workers has been teaching local kids to surf the waves of Kabic Beach, roughly 45 minutes outside of Haiti's cultural capital, Jacmel. Many of these kids, despite growing up on the water, first had to learn to swim.

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Runners: You’ve Never Seen Haiti Like This

sperkins-pom — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

To shed a more positive light on the troubled country, a group of seven ran from Cap Haitian to Jacmel, crossing the entire island from north to south, averaging marathon-distances every day.

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6 Caribbean ��ϳԹ��s Without the Crowds

sperkins-pom — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Rule number one for outdoor lovers thinking about an escape to the Caribbean? Get off the beaten path. Otherwise you’ll be herded onto overdeveloped beaches and cookie-cutter resorts teeming with the same people you’re hoping to get away from. (If that’s what you want, a flight to South Florida is much cheaper.) Instead, touch down on one of these lesser-known islands, where you’ll find dreamy beaches,��world-class fishing, hiking, mountain biking, and, most important, no crowds.

Hike, Don’t Drive, on Saba

(Wikimedia Commons)

You can land on the five-square-mile island of (home to the smallest commercial runway in the world at 1,312 feet, with each end leading off a cliff) and get around using nothing more than your two feet. The airport and Saba’s two main towns, the and , are connected by a series of old walking trails. Before the appearance of in the 1950s, these canopied paths were the main thoroughfares for locals. Pack light and you can hike from hotel to hotel in under two hours through the rainforest, from �ٴ��. Or you can stop halfway and spend a night at the . In between, locals will point you to the , a staircase-like climb that leads to the island’s highest point and a sweeping view of Windwardside.

Don’t expect to find many beaches. Saba’s volcanic base gives it a coastline of jagged cliffs that top out at more than 3,000 feet. The island has only two legit strips of sand:�� and the man-made . No complaints here—it keeps the daiquiri-sipping tourists at bay.

Get there: Fly to St. Maarten, and then it’s a quick island hopper on to Saba. You can also��.

Dive the Blue Holes of Andros

(Wikimedia Commons)

The term “blue hole” has become synonymous with Belize, but the Bahamian island of Andros actually has the highest concentration of them in the world—178 on land and at least 50 in the sea. The holes are at the top of an expansive underwater cave network formed by the eroding limestone bedrock. Tourists can scuba and snorkel right through them. Chances are they won’t be crowded since there are no cruise ships or high-rises on Andros.

The blue holes at South Bight are the most popular because they have the most marine life. But Vermont native turned Andros local Jessie Leopold, owner of , also recommends the Crack, an area where on-land and in-ocean blue holes abut one another.��

Need a rest day? Drive over a causeway from St. Nicholls or San Andros to , 14 miles from the airport. It’s home to a tribe of black Seminoles, ancestors of Native Americans and slaves from Florida who fled from persecution in the early 19th century. They’re known for living off the land and crafting palm thatch baskets. It is possible to visit, just be polite when taking photos.

Get there: Fly to Nassau and either or take a .

Mountain Bike in Haiti

(KSKImages/iStock)

In 2012, just two years after Haiti’s devastating earthquake, a small team of Americans visited the island in hopes of establishing the first professional mountain biking stage race in the country. On that trip, Chris Kehmeier, a trail specialist from the��, called one of the gnarliest trails he’d ever seen due to its steep, exposed, rocky terrain.��

The following year, the was born (ayiti translates to “land of mountains”). Using Haitian vendors and local staff, the race injects money into the local economy. The took bikers a total of 65 miles through rural villages from the mountains of Port au Prince to the coastal region of Marigot. On the first day, the course climbed a bruising 8,000 feet into La Visite National Park.

Prepping for its third year this January, the race (not for beginners) showcases Haitian culture along with the stunning landscape. Labeled a “cultural immersion experience” by its creators, the event combines three days of biking with three days of historical tours, trail development, and themed celebrations to connect visitors and locals. The six-day program costs��$1,950 per person.��Not in the mood to race? You can still access the trails, but contact MTV Ayiti to find a guide. Going it alone is not recommended.

Get there: Fly to Port au Prince direct from Miami.

Bonefish in Los Roques

(Nick Kelley)

The Bahamas may be known for excellent bonefishing, but if you want to ditch the crowds, consider , 85 miles off the coast of Venezuela. Yes, the South American country gets a bad rap, but that keeps this marine park immaculate and devoid of American crowds. The U.S. State Department lists a travel warning for Caracas and the Venezuelan interior, but Los Roques is a 45-minute flight in the other direction.��

“Los Roques has a��series of super-shallow pancake flats that are surrounded by deeper water,” says Michael Caranci of��, the first group of anglers legally licensed to fish in the area. “The shallow flats��have a firm bottom that is perfect for��stalking fish on foot.” Because it’s closer to the equator, Los Roques enjoys a longer fishing season (February to October) than the islands of the northern Caribbean.��

If you want to see some of the best preserved coral reefs in the Western Hemisphere, check out Ecobuzos Dive ��ϳԹ��s.

Get there: You’ll need to to Los Rocques Airlines, Chaipi Air, Albatros, Blue Star, or LTA.

Get Your Diving Cert on Petit St. Vincent

(Cowbell Solo/)

is a private island at the southern tip of the Grenadines. It’s extremely small—just 115 acres. The island features only 22 cottages (no Wi-Fi or telephones) and two restaurants. But don’t worry about the lack of land, because you’ll be spending all your time off the grid and in the water.

Owned and operated by the son of Jacques Cousteau, ��opened in the beginning of November. The dive center offers guided and instructional dives through what Cousteau calls some of the healthiest reefs in the Caribbean. It’s only the second Jean-Michel Cousteau school in the world and the first in the Western Hemisphere (the other is in Fiji).

Divers can ride tidal currents through the , explore the , track down lobsters and six-foot-tall coral at Frigate Point, and explore the underwater cave at Sail Rock. Beginners can get PADI certified.

Get there: Fly to Barbados, and then change to Union Island. From there, it’s a 20-minute boat ride to .

Race on Nevis

(Courtesy of Nevis Triathlon)

Nevis has been given the nickname “Island of Sport.” Why? The islanders love competition. Take, for instance, the area’s buzzing ��Ի� scenes or its (November) and the 2.5-mile interisland swim to (last Sunday in March).

That reputation keeps growing. Last year, Nevis hosted its first�� in September, featuring a marathon, half marathon, 10K, 5K, and 3K. It drew a modest 400 people, but with a second go-round already planned for September 2015, Nevis is shaping up to be a well-rounded destination for competitive racers.

The island is only 35 square miles and encircled by a 20-mile road—. The interior is connected by a series of forested hiking trails that skirt around and through the island’s highest point at 3,232 feet. You can also check out the fishing—recently installed have attracted tuna, wahoo, dorado, kingfish, snapper, barracuda, shark, and mahimahi.

When it’s time to put your feet up, locals recommend the beaches on the west side for relaxing. Don’t miss��, , and��, where the sand is soft and the water calm. If you’re looking to stay active, head to the reefs of on the Windward side for snorkeling.

Get there: JetBlue and Spirit can get you to St. Maarten, where you can hop on a plane to Nevis or jump on a . American and JetBlue both go to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where you can switch to , ,��ǰ� to Nevis.

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Trying to Help in Haiti

sperkins-pom — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The cinder-block school has no windows and no doors, just a string of incandescent lightbulbs hanging down the center of the ceiling like the spine of a great whale. It’s hot and humid, and the room throbs with the voices of 200 Haitians who have paused from fishing, gardening, or painting the sides of handmade wooden sailboats to come see the special visitor who has traveled 1,500 miles to Île de la Tortue, an island where the hills are green and lush and the sand is sugar white and the small children play with shells that line the shore by the thousands.

They have been waiting all day under this tin roof, watching one local man set up his old Casio keyboard and another tune the heads of his bongos, so that they can see the blan, the white man, the first ever to visit the school on this nearly roadless island five miles north of the Haitian mainland. In short, they have come to see me. And I have come to see one of them: Ervenson, the Haitian boy whom I have been sponsoring for 12 years.

Every month since the fall of 2000, I’ve sent roughly $35, or about $5,000 in total, through a Christian organization called . Compassion funnels money to children all over the world to pay for things like tuition, schoolbooks, clothes, food, medicine, and sneakers. I sent the money to give him a better life. And I’m here to see if it actually made any difference.

The only contact Ervenson and I had during that time was through handwritten letters. I wrote the first one when I was 15 and included a photo of myself in a ball-chain necklace, my braces sparkling in the camera’s flash, a few dozen zits covering my face. With his response, I received multiple copies of the same photo of him, one that I can only barely remember now. He was five, with a shaved head and a baggy, short-sleeved shirt that buttoned up in the front. His lips were pinched tight against a smile.

Often the letters would pass each other in the mail, so they never became much of a conversation. They were more like questionnaires. How did he like school? What did he do with his friends? What was the weather like? Each letter was translated by someone working for Compassion, and there were times when I felt like I was getting updates about a relative through an aunt. Oh, Ervenson? He’s a soccer star, and he loves the color purple.

Children line up in front of their classroom before class at Church of God of Savanne Tapion School. (Ben Depp)

As I sit at the front of the schoolroom, a keyboard amplifier blasting in my ears, I wonder whether we’ll have anything to talk about. Will he like me? And then there’s the larger question: Did the money do any good? Each month I sent a check, trusted that it was being put to good use, and forgot about the transaction entirely.

At this precise moment, however, I am most worried that I won’t recognize him. Because for as long as I’ve known Ervenson, the only pictures I’ve seen of him have been small headshots. He could be any of the teenage boys in the room. So I smile at everyone, just to be safe. And then, in a lull in the dancing and singing, the translator leans over and says, “Here is the boy.” And here he is. Ervenson. Pimply faced and thin. His eyes are wide. His arms are like piano strings, stretched wide to welcome me.

When I started sponsoring Ervenson, I was camping at a Christian alt-music festival in rural Illinois, where bands played concerts for sweaty mosh pits of Jesus-loving teens. Between two of the shows, someone from Compassion International got on stage and talked about how difficult it was to be a child in places like Haiti. They described the lack of clean water, the rampant disease, the voodoo ceremonies on every corner. Even then I was vaguely aware of my privilege as a white American male and felt a little guilty about it. Plus, I had a part-time job at a guitar store, which meant that I had enough spending money that I wouldn’t miss thirty-odd dollars out of my monthly paycheck. I signed up as soon as I got home. All I had to do was get online, do a quick search by age, country, or birthday (in case I wanted someone who shared mine), and then click that I agreed to send the checks.

Almost immediately, Compassion sent an e-mail suggesting that I write to Ervenson. Many child-sponsorship organizations actually support villages, not children—the child that you “sponsor” actually just lives within that village. Not Compassion. My money went directly to him, less 20 percent for overhead. It’s one of the few organizations in the $3.4 billion child-sponsorship industry where you can exchange letters and develop a relationship.

Which I tried to do—until I was a junior in high school. Until that point, I’d been as Christian as you could get. I “witnessed” to friends, trying to get them to accept Jesus as their savior. I led praise and worship at , an annual event where Christians gathered in front of their high schools and prayed before classes started. I held a Bible study in my house once a week.

But at 17, I rejected my faith. Mostly because it stopped making sense to me. Jesus was friends with prostitutes and the poor, he wanted to help the outcasts. But it seemed to me that many churches—or at least the ones I’d been to—were missing the point. The larger a church was, the more money it spent on sound systems and video equipment and massive buildings with large water features out front instead of helping people who needed clothes or food or a place to live. It began to feel more like a rock concert or a gala—a place people went to be seen or to impress other people.

So, in the black-and-white thinking of youth, I gave up. I felt like a hypocrite when I sang praise and worship songs in front of other kids, because I didn’t believe a word of it. Instead, in 2002, I started smoking pot, became a Democrat, and stopped writing Ervenson. The letters had begun to feel a little fake. When I asked questions, he rarely answered them; when he wrote, it sounded like he was being prompted. I later found out that Compassion makes the kids write three letters a year. Besides, Compassion International is a Christian organization, and though I wasn’t quite clear how, I knew that they were evangelizing to him. I didn’t stop sending my monthly 35 bucks, which seemed cruel. But I did stop caring.

The only time I really thought about him was when I got another letter. They didn’t say anything important, but they made me think. About him. About being a Christian. I thought about whether God was being shoved down his throat. I wondered if that was a fair trade-off for getting an education.

Even though I had my doubts, I kept sending money. It felt good in that pat-yourself-on-the-back, first-world-guilt-assuasion sort of way. It was maybe the one selfless thing I did with regularity, and I believed that being a good person required selflessness. I had started to think that that was what Jesus was really getting at anyway. Don’t judge people. Love others like you would yourself. If you have money or food or clothes and someone else doesn’t, help them out. I hoped that’s what I was doing with Ervenson.

Don’t get me wrong. I still got angry that megachurches built stadium-size sanctuaries when people in their communities were homeless. And I still couldn’t see any reason why Christians would make it into heaven but other good people—be they Buddhist or Muslim or atheist—were doomed to hell. But I realized that I could be a different type of Christian than that. And in my own faith, sending Ervenson money was exactly the type of thing I felt I should do. I started writing to Ervenson again. It was still boilerplate stuff—it’s snowing here, study hard—but it made me feel a little less shame for not being involved.

It did not, however, help me know him better. When the earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010, I stood in my apartment in front of the TV with a bowl of oatmeal and tried to remember where he lived. Port-au-Prince? La Gonave? I had thrown away each of his letters as I read them, so there was no way of going back to see. And though I worried a little, I didn’t take the time to call Compassion to find out.

Then, in late 2011, I got an e-mail. Ervenson would like to meet you, it said. It was a form e-mail, something every sponsor gets on occasion, but it was the first time I had received it. If I wanted to, I could pay Compassion to join a handful of other sponsors to meet our respective kids. By then, Ervenson was 17, and I was 26. In a year, he’d be an adult and I’d no longer support him. This was my last chance to see him. I decided: Yes, I did want to meet him.

I expect Haiti to look poor. I expect vast tent cities sprawled out on the hillsides and buildings half demolished by the quake and people picking through garbage for food. I do not expect it to be beautiful. When I arrive in Port-au-Prince in April 2012, one of a dozen Compassion sponsors here to meet their kids, the Caribbean is the sort of blue I’ve rarely seen. The mountains seem to cover the length of the island. People are everywhere, dressed in bright purples and oranges and yellows. Tap-tap truck taxis painted in pseudo-psychedelic patterns careen through the streets, bouncing over potholes, the people inside swaying in unison like a choir.

[quote]Tap-tap truck taxis painted in pseudo-psychedelic patterns careen through the streets, bouncing over potholes, the people inside swaying in unison like a choir.[/quote]

We see our first tent city as the road curves north around the bay. A patch of sea blue tents and tarps appears on a denuded hillside. Beyond the tents, stones are arranged in acre-large squares. “Are those fields?” I ask, thinking that perhaps Haitians have used the after-earthquake chaos to start new agricultural ventures.

“Those are mass graves from the earthquake,” says Ben Depp, an American-born photographer who has spent the past five years in Haiti.

“There were so many dead, we had to burn some of them,” adds Jeannot, our Haitian translator, who was himself trapped for two days in the rubble.

After the earthquake, money poured into every NGO working in Haiti, including Compassion. The organization sponsors more than 75,000 children here. There are programs for babies, kids in school, and college students, but they all work roughly the same. Donors send a check, Compassion routes it to its in-country offices (staffed almost entirely by Haitians), and they in turn give 80 percent of the cash to the kids to spend on various specific things: food, health care, books, supplies, tuition at Christian schools, things like that. ��

Thankfully, I learn that kids do not have to accept Jesus in order to attend school, though they do have to attend a weekly meeting called Club, where they learn about Jesus and how to be a moral person. But I appear to be alone in my concern about evangelism.

Ervenson, left, and Jonah Ogles look at a photo of the author at age 15. (Ben Depp)

On that first night, all of the visiting sponsors gather at the hotel for a quick talk. “OK,” says Yvonne, our wispy tour leader, who wears a permanent smile. “What did you see today?”

The group is quiet for a minute before one woman finally speaks up. “There’s a spiritual darkness here,” she says. Heads nod in agreement throughout the circle.

Ben and I look sideways at each other, my eyes trying to say, Can you believe this? Granted, it’s been only one day, but I’ve seen more churches than public-service buildings.

“Voodoo has such a stronghold,” she adds. (In the mind of most evangelicals, voodoo is pure evil, though it’s really an amalgamation of West African animism and Roman Catholicism.) And so the group prays that Compassion’s programs will help lead people out of voodoo and into Christianity.

Thankfully, I have Ben as a roommate. Like me, he grew up in a conservative Christian home in the States and moved strongly to the left in college. And like me, he was a little uncomfortable with the meeting. So we sneak away after the prayer and step onto our third-floor balcony overlooking the Caribbean.

While working as a photographer for outlets like The New York Times and Newsweek, Ben’s been present at some of Haiti’s most pivotal moments in recent history. When the earthquake hit, he and his wife were at home in Petionville, a leafy neighborhood in the hills outside Port-au-Prince. Dressers, tables, and chairs fell over; pots and pans hit the floor. The three-story hotel behind them crumbled, but their house stood. Much of the poorer parts of the city weren’t so lucky. He said there was dust in his teeth, throat, and eyelashes. Once the ground stopped shaking, Ben grabbed a pickax and helped dig through the rubble looking for bodies. “It was like the apocalypse. The dead and the injured were everywhere,” he says. “Everybody was helping dig strangers out from under collapsed houses and caring for the injured.”

Ben’s most haunting photos came from the cholera epidemic, introduced, tragically, by UN peacekeeping troops who came to the country after the earthquake. “I was on my motorcycle, trying to see what the situation was like,” he tells me. “People were literally dropping dead in the streets.” Cholera causes rapid fluid loss. To date, more than 8,000 Haitians—men, women, and many, many children—have died of it. Victims look like corpses even before they die. Ben once found the body of a dead ten-year-old on a rubble-strewn stretch of road. “His mother hadn’t understood how quickly cholera could kill him,” he said. “She didn’t have money to do anything with the body, so she put him in the road for the government body collectors to find.”

The earthquake and the resulting cholera epidemic are only the most recent disasters here. Haiti has suffered through 200 years of brutal dictatorships, military invasions, and natural disasters. The chaos doesn’t stop people from trying to understand and fix it. Haiti’s streets are full of young, white do-gooders in shiny Land Rovers, many from NGOs, governments, or other secular outfits. But every day another group of Christians in matching T-shirts arrives to spend a week building churches or playing with kids. Ben says he hasn’t seen them make a real impact.

“A lot of Christian organizations send groups here for quick trips,” Ben says. “They build a latrine or a school and then head home.” Their efforts may provide some relief in the short term, but they don’t create jobs or a lasting infrastructure—things Haitians desperately need.

It’s not just Christian organizations that come up short, though. Haiti has been called the NGO Republic. As many as 10,000 of them operate in the country, and they’re often criticized for making the situation worse. “It’s one thing to provide water for six months,” says Jake Johnston, who studies aid in Haiti for the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “But they’re not going to provide a public water system for the future of the country.”

NGOs don’t have to coordinate with the government and often start projects without consulting a community. Once construction is under way, much of the money never makes it into Haitian hands. Of the $450 million USAID has spent here since the earthquake, more than 70 percent has gone to U.S. contractors. “It’s hard to have a strong state when NGOs are doing much of the work,” says Johnston.

Remarkably, no one had ever really looked at whether child sponsorship helped or hurt the people it supported until three years ago, when Bruce Wydick, a developmental economist at the University of San Francisco and a Compassion sponsor himself, decided to study the organization. He found that sponsored kids are nearly 27 percent more likely to graduate from high school, have a better chance at getting a white-collar job, and make an average of $14 to $19 more each month. When nearly two-thirds of the country lives on less than a $1.25 a day, as they do in Haiti, that’s a substantial improvement.

“It’s a pretty cost-intensive way of addressing poverty,” Wydick says. It costs more than buying a mosquito net or building a water pipe, for example. “But it works.”

Students in adjacent classrooms at the Church of God of Savanne Tapion school. (Ben Depp)

Yet, Wydick’s research hit upon another important aspect of sponsorship. “Compassion does a good job of addressing the internal issues, which we’re finding to be just as important as external.” In other words, self-confidence may be just as crucial to finishing school (and overcoming poverty) as infrastructure. And a big part of addressing those internal issues, Wydick says, is the letters the kids get from their sponsors.

“They have these people telling them, ‘Study hard and you can be successful,’” says Wydick. “And they believe it.”

Ervenson and his family live in a seaside shack on Île de la Tortue (Turtle Island), Haiti’s northernmost island, a 69-square-mile speck five miles north of the mainland. Three hundred and fifty years ago, its primary occupants were a band of European pirates called the Brethren of the Coast. The Brethren are gone, but the island doesn’t look much different today. There are few cars and even fewer roads; the only way to get there is by boat. But first Ben, Jeannot, and I must get to Saint-Louis-du-Nord, on the north shore of the mainland.

After a two-hour wait for the six-seater plane, a one-hour flight, a stop for chicken and rice (Haiti’s national dish), and an hour in the car, we finally reach the dock in Saint-Louis. Live goats hang upside on the sides of pickup trucks, and small tin-sided shacks sell lottery tickets linked to numbers drawn in the States or Venezuela. The sun washes out the colors, making everything look Instagrammed. A small motorboat with a suspect Yamaha engine is waiting for us. But there are two problems: it’s already late afternoon, and our hotel is here in Saint-Louis. Meaning we’ll have to turn right back around from La Tortue—90 minutes away—if we want to make it back before sunset.

Jeannot doesn’t think we should go. “We won’t have time to see him,” he says. “We should go in the morning.”

“How much time would we have on the island tomorrow?” I ask.

“A couple hours,” he says.

After 12 years, I want more than two hours. “Can we stay on the island?” I ask him.

Jeannot and the pastor and the boat captain and a committee of men whose roles I’m not sure of converse in Creole. Ben whispers a translation to me.

“There’s no hotel on the island,” he says. “They don’t know where we can sleep.”

I’m prepared to sleep on the boat if I have to. Eventually, their desire to please the foreigner outweighs their concerns. We go tonight.

Shirtless men with sea salt dried on their backs carry us on their shoulders like children, 30 yards through the water to the boat. After nearly a week in Port-au-Prince’s dust-choked streets and the endless mud of everywhere else, the water here is shockingly blue and clear. The captain spears a bit of meat with a hook and trails it off the boat, searching for fish. A dolphin briefly swims alongside us, weaving in and out of our wake.

Ervenson, 17, at his home. (Ben Depp)

After 90 minutes, we reach La Tortue. Lush hills rise up from the sea. Giant trees line the shore. Boats bounce through the waves, their sails made of tarps, billboard scraps, old sheets, anything they can use. On shore, a small crowd waits for us. Pastor Eustache, a short bald man in glasses who runs the school and church here, shakes my hand. I am the first sponsor to visit this Compassion-supported school, and the community has prepared a welcome ceremony, he says.

We walk through sandy paths lined with bamboo, until we reach the long, gray school. It feels like the whole village is here. I’m starting to get nervous about giving a speech when Jeannot says, “Here is the boy.” Ervenson walks in. I start to speak, but before I can say anything, his arms are around me. Everyone cheers, like we’re long-lost relatives on a daytime talk show. It’s exciting to see him—but also awkward. He barely speaks English; I know only a few words of Creole. So every so often I reach over and pat his shoulder. I am your friend, I’m sorry that I haven’t written as much as I should have, and I’m really happy that you look healthy.

In his last letter, Ervenson said that he recently bought a new pair of shoes with the money I sent. “Hey!” I say, pointing to his white Dexter-brand shoes. “Cool shoes!” But he covers them up, pulling his jeans over them, like I’ve made fun of them. Then he gets up and walks out.

Where is he going? I think. Memories of the way kids made fun of my fake Doc Martens in middle school come flooding back. Or maybe he’s embarrassed because his shoes are nicer than those on the other kids I see.��

When he finally reappears minutes later, he has changed shoes, though I’ll never figure out why. He doesn’t make eye contact as he sits down next to me, so I put an arm around him. Hey man, cultural misunderstanding there. But we’re OK, right? He half-smiles, like he has no clue what I’m saying but wants to be accommodating.

After the ceremony—a half-dozen speeches, another song, an impressive breakdance performance by Ervenson and his friends—he takes me to his home. We pass shacks with thatch roofs, fishing rafts made of bundled logs, and wood-beam ships in various stages of decay. The house’s frame used to be covered in a plaster-like material, but it’s gone now, rotted away by time, sun, and seawater. Tin pieces cover gaping holes to keep out the wind, rain, and sand. The metal roof is rusted through in several places. The cement floor crumbles away. The family lives maybe 20 yards from the ocean, and the tide sometimes washes over the floor, forcing them to wait it out with neighbors until the water recedes.

As I look around his house, my first instinct is guilt. Right now I have $200 tucked into various pockets and my shoes. I briefly consider giving it all to him. But we’ve been cautioned by Compassion to avoid giving money on this trip. And part of me thinks, I gave $5,000—how do they not have a decent house? Did they never get the money? Or is the rusted tin an improvement over a thatch roof? Did I not send enough?

I set my backpack down on the floor and bring out a gift for him. A picture of my family.

“This is my mom, my sister, my brother, and my dad,” I say. Now that I’m here, the picture looks like exhibit A in First World wealth, with our electric lights and aluminum siding and a front door with a holiday wreath on it. So I quickly show him a picture of me and my girlfriend instead.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” I ask.

“N��.”

“N�𱹱��?”

“N��.”

“Is there any girl you want to be your girlfriend?” The crowd giggles as Jeannot translates.

“I have seen some,” he says, lowering his head and almost, just almost, breaking a smile.

As Ervenson and I talk through Ben and Jeannot’s translations, I start to piece together a picture of his life. His father’s only job is selling green wood to be made into charcoal on the mainland. The family mostly live on rice and beans, but sometimes they buy a chicken when they can afford it. They don’t have mosquito nets, so when the family—all 11 of them—sleep on the floor of this 150-square-foot house, they are sometimes bitten and contract malaria. Then they have to go to the mainland to get treatment. The pastor says that they’re able to do that because of the money I sent, but I can’t be sure he’s not buttering me up.

The insects already cover my arms and legs when the pastor says we have to leave, that we’ll be staying at his house tonight. It’s only a five-minute walk from Ervenson’s, but it’s as if I walked into a house in America. He has glass windows. There’s a large cinder-block wall surrounding his acre-plus property. His bedroom, which he graciously offers to Ben, Jeannot, and I, has a queen bed with a headboard, footboard, and mattress. There are two dressers, like you’d see in any American home. His wife has maybe five dozen porcelain figurines spread on every flat surface available. “This is the nicest house I’ve seen here,” Ben says.

[quote]His life will probably resemble his father’s: he will work in the fields, he will collect wood, he will build a small house on his beautiful little island with views of the sea, and over time it will slowly, inevitably fall apart.[/quote]

The next morning, Ervenson gives me a tour of the island. We see his school, with the broken tables and the benches made of planks set atop cinder blocks. We see the soccer field that floods in the rainy season, where Ervenson tells me he scored a goal from the opposite end of the field last year. We see the natural spring where Ervenson bathes before school, after school, and before bed. Through Ben’s translations, we talk about his family’s garden, an hour’s walk deeper into the island, where they grow breadfruit, mango, spinach, beans, and potatoes.

“It’s beautiful,” Ervenson says of his island. “A beautiful little spot.”

Does he think he’ll have to leave this place if he wants to work? I ask.

Maybe, he says. For a job. “I would really like to work in an office,” Ben translates. Then Ervenson says he has a question for me. “Can I come visit you?”

It catches me by total surprise. I try to imagine Ervenson showing up in my tiny studio apartment back in the U.S. Sleeping on my couch. Trying to cook something on the stove while I’m at work. Deciding to stay permanently while he goes to college. It’s selfish and un-Christian, but I can’t imagine myself enjoying that.

I’m pretty comfortable with the current arrangement of sending money, occasionally writing a letter, and keeping my distance. Which may be the problem with the NGO-donor relationship in general. When disaster strikes, it feels good to send money, whether it’s a tweet to the Red Cross or through an organization like Compassion. But most of us don’t want to go beyond that.

“What do I say?” I ask Ben in English, worried that Ervenson is picking up on my hesitation.

“I can say it’s difficult,” says Ben. “That there are visas and documents that have to be signed. That it’s not an easy thing.”

“Do that,” I tell Ben. So he does.

Before I leave Ervenson, he walks me to the dock, carrying my backpack from his home, past the village market, and over the beaches so thick with shells, we have to watch where we’re walking.

“Do you think you’ll have a good life?” I ask. He takes a moment.

“I have some hope for myself with my education,” he says. “If I can finish this education and continue high school, I think that things can be good.”

The trouble is, he doesn’t finish high school. For the next 17 months, I write him once a month, encouraging him to study hard, trying to do what Bruce Wydick, the developmental economist, says effective sponsors do. Then, in October 2013, I get an e-mail that says:

Ervenson has left Compassion’s program because [of] unjustified absence from program activities for two consecutive months. This means he is no longer able to be sponsored. Please know that your sponsorship made a difference in the life of this child, and even though he is no longer in the program, the love you have shown will continue to have a great impact.

Ervenson (Ben Depp)

Despite the reassurance, I don’t know that it did have a great impact. I knew that high school was a stretch for him—his teacher told me he was an average student. But the point of donating the money was to give him a better life. Ervenson got roughly $28 of my money each month. That’s far more than the majority of his fellow Haitians make in a month. Some of that (roughly $6.25 per month) went to pay for school, and some went to books and school uniforms. Those things are relatively cheap in Haiti. What I don’t get is, how did the money not improve his life more than that?

Maybe most of it went to higher tuition, which in turn put a new roof on the church or created jobs for teachers. And really, I’d be OK with either of those. But when I look at Ervenson’s home, at his father’s life, at Ervenson’s own future, it feels like the money failed. I believe Wydick when he says that, over time and a large enough sample size, Compassion helps people move into the middle class. Indeed, one former Compassion child is now in Haiti’s Parliament.

But I also know that this island is far removed from many of Haiti’s most pressing problems, such as cholera, the earthquake, and deforestation. And still, the money did not lift him out of poverty. Maybe it takes time. Maybe it takes more money. I’m not an economist. I’m just a kid who—perhaps naively—believed that I could make a difference.

The money did what Jesus asked when he told his followers to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick, etc. But, as with most aid to Haiti, I don’t think it will have a long-term impact, at least not in this particular case. His life will probably resemble his father’s: he will work in the fields, he will collect wood, he will build a small house on his beautiful little island with views of the sea, and over time it will slowly, inevitably fall apart.

When Ervenson left Compassion, I debated whether I would sponsor again. On the one hand, I’m still not comfortable with the evangelism, and I worry about contributing to Haiti’s aid problem; on the other, I believe that the money can make a difference, though there’s no guarantee that it will. And then, less than two months after Ervenson left, Compassion sent me a letter from another boy named Widny. I didn’t request it, but it was sent all the same. Widny is nine years old. He lives on Haiti’s southern coast, about 130 miles from La Tortue. He likes math and soccer and the color yellow. I grabbed a pen, and I wrote him back.

is an associate editor at ��ϳԹ��.

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The Natural Life of Zombies

sperkins-pom — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

IT IS LATE morning in Port-au-Prince, and the Haitian psychiatrist’s chauffeur has arrived to drive us up north to meet two zombies.

Narcisse visits the tomb where he was buried in 1962. He claims to have spent three days underground.

A madiawe, or poison-maker, prepares to grate human skull for his potion.

We are ready. Wiggins, my traveling companion, has packed a bag of supplies, including a rusty pocketknife and a first-aid kit with bandages, antiseptic, and something called Dr. Seltzer’s Hangover Remedy. He has just dashed up to his room to add some Lomotil to his kit after spotting a suspicious substance floating in his breakfast Pepsi. He does not have anything that will raise the dead. But that has already been taken care of.

Zombies, according to my Webster’s are, “will-less and speechless humans in the West Indies… who are held to have died and been reanimated.” They are “people whose decrease has been duly recorded, and whose burial has been witnessed, but who are found a few years later living with a bokor (voodoo sorcerer) in a state verging on idiocy,” reports Alfred Metraux’s classic 1959 study, . You know about zombies if you ever saw or a hundred other horror films. Wiggins and I had ourselves prepared for our Haitian expedition by renting and studying on my VCR a 1964 zombie film, , in which the hero lands on “Voodoo Island” and remarks to a native, “I’ve heard a rumor that there’s an army of walking dead on this island. Is there any truth to that?” Minutes later, the hero and his friends are being chased by a mob of zombies (played by black people made up with what appears to be facial mudpacks over bad cases of acne). Those who are caught are themselves turned into zombies.

This prompted some discussion among those viewing the film with us as to whether Wiggins was in any danger of returning from Haiti as a zombie. His sister-in-law rightly pointed out that it would be very good for the story if he did and would also provide his wife with material for a sequel: I Was Married to a Zombie.

No soap, said Mrs. W. As far as she was concerned, zombification nullified wedding vows. Everybody laughed.

A few days later, we would learn that this is exactly what had happened in the case of Clairvius Narcisse.

WE’D FIRST HEARD of Narcisse, currently the most famous zombie in Haiti, through the work of E. Wade Davis, a Harvard graduate student in ethnobotany, a field that combines botany and anthropology. In 1983, Davis published an article in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology reporting on research he had conducted among Haitian zombies and zombie-makers. Following up on work done by a Haitian psychiatrist named Lamarque Douyon, Davis had concluded that there is “an ethnopharmacological basis to the zombi phenomenon.”

For centuries, followers of the voodoo religion, which is derived from West African religions carried to Haiti by slaves, have believed that zombies are real. Metraux reported cases of concerned relatives strangling or shooting the corpses of loved ones before burial, to prevent their being called back as zombies. A number of writers on Haiti reported the belief that zombies had never really died, but had been given a poison that only made them appear dead. This belief was reflected in the old Haitian Penal Code, which classified as attempted murder “the use that may be made against a person of substances which, without causing death, produce a prolonged lethargic effect… If following the state of lethargy the person has been buried, the act will be considered murder.” Nevertheless, most non-voodooists generally dismissed zombies as creature of folklore, existing only in the fevered imaginations of a superstitious people. Then Davis found the zombie poison.

Davis obtained samples of the poison from several bokors in scattered villages. The ingredients were not always the same— “It’s not like Merck Pharmaceuticals,” Davis told me later. “The potion varies.” But a handful of ingredients appeared again and again. These included human remains (chemically inert) and a large toad (Bufo marinus), parts of which have been used in Central and South America as a hallucinogen and an arrow poison. Most significantly, Davis found that the potions included several varieties of puffer fish. The skin and certain internal organs of these fish contain a lethal nerve toxin called tetrodotoxin, which, in minute doses, can induce severe paralysis and lower a person’s heartbeat and respiration to such a point that even a trained physician might mistakenly pronounce the victim dead. Such cases are well known in Japan, where the puffer fish, known as fugu, is consumed as a delicacy. Hundreds of Japanese gourmets have died from eating improperly prepared fugu, and the medical literature also records cases of “dead” fugu victims coming back to life as their bodies were being carted off to the crematorium.

The making of a zombie, Davis reported, involves religious beliefs and rituals. Even the bokors who administer the poison, he noted, truly believe that the poison kills and that it is skillfully practiced magic that calls a zombie back from the dead (except in the odd case where the poison kills “too completely,” or the victim suffocates in the grave). But it is the poison, Davis concluded, that makes zombification possible. A bokor administers the poison to a victim by applying it repeatedly to the victim’s skin or into an open wound or sore. The victim gets sick, “dies,” and though still conscious, is buried. The bokor goes to the graveyard at night, digs up the victim, feeds him an energizing counteragent (cane syrup mixed with sweet potato and a hallucinogenic plant called the zombie cucumber), and leads him away into slavery. Voila—one zombie, to go.��

All of this was intriguing, so last summer I visited Harvard to call on Davis, but I was told he was back in Haiti. No one knew when he would return or where he could be reached. Professor Richard Schultes, Davis’s adviser and a pioneer ethnobotanist, showed me the last letter he had received from his student several weeks before.

“My field assistant and I have completely infiltrated the secret society,” it read. “We have been given the secret passwords, the ritualistic handshakes and forms of address, and the magic formulae of the poisons. I have entered into the initial phases of the initiation as it seems the only way to obtain the information I must have. The next phase is called the ‘nuit du,‘ the hard night, and it includes a blood oath and the consumption of a toxic preparation. At that time they are said to teach you what will happen if the secrets are betrayed. No one knows what this rite will entail as no white has ever gone through it, nor any anthropologist. The society Emperor has told me to bring two sets of clothes, for according to him the set one arrives in will be in rags by the end of the night. I am most anxious to obtain the ingredients of the toxic preparation.”

I finally tracked down Davis in Virginia several months later, where he had gone to recover from malaria and hepatitis (his dysentery had passed) and to write a book about his experiences. “I got so sick I didn’t complete the initiation,” he said. Still, he was confident he had learned the truth about the zombie poison and the zombification process. “The key to this kind of fieldwork is finding the secret that will get you the respect of the people you’re dealing with. In a lot of situations, in Haiti especially, it’s important not to appear to be afraid.”

Davis told me how he had obtained his first sample of the zombie poison from a bokor named Marcel Pierre. Pierre had given Davis a potion that Davis knew to be bogus. The next day Davis stormed into Pierre’s house, said he had used the poison on an enemy to no effect, and threatened to denounce Pierre as a fraud. Pierre produced a vial of the actual poison, which Davis pretended to rub on his hands. “The blanc is going to die,” Pierre told Davis’s assistant. Davis did not die; Pierre was impressed. Davis returned the next morning to find the proper ingredients for the zombie poison drying on Pierre’s clothesline.

Davis’s anger, his threat, his game with the deadly poison were all “part of the dance,” he explained to me. “That was just a dance that that particular culture demanded.”

IF WE HAVE to dance with zombie-makers, I resolve as we set out on our journey, I will let Wiggins lead. He has the pocket knife, and it is my obligation, after all, to return to tell the tale. We drive down the hill from the Hotel Oloffson into the crowded heart of Port-au-Prince—four of us in a little green Italian jeep. The driver, Jean-Claude, and the car have been provided by Dr. Douyon. Jean-Claude speaks French and Creole, the Haitian patois, but not English, so we have hired a translator from among the guides hanging out on the hotel driveway. He is Melfort, an eager young man wearing overlong plaid bell-bottom pants. He is looking forward to meeting the zombies, whom he has already seen on Haitian television.

We drive through streets jammed with pedestrians and honking communal taxis and minibuses, finally, out of the city into a countryside of villages of pink and yellow stucco huts surrounded by fields of sugar cane and banana trees. The terrain switches abruptly to desert, complete with cactus, and then back to lush villages again. To our right rise steep, dry mountains. To our left we can see the blue and turquoise Gulf of Gonave. As we drive, Jean-Claude listens to the results of ��the national lottery on the radio. His number does not come up.

We pass more villages, each with its cemetery, where elaborate tombs, like little houses, have been built above the graves by families who can afford them. We pass more patches of desert and signs marking dirt roads that lead down to the shore and the Jolly Beach Club and the Haitian Club Med. Melfort points out the road leading to the beach house of Haiti’s President-for-Life, Jeane Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier. After 90 minutes, we arrive at the town of St. Marc. Across from an Esso station, we find the home of Marcel Pierre, the bokor who knows the secrets of making zombies.

THERE ARE TWO types of spiritual intermediaries in the voodoo religion, houngans and bokors. Houngans (priests) are the prime clergy. The preside over traditional ceremonies, intercede between individuals and the many voodoo gods, heal the sick, see the future, and dispense personal and political advice. Houngans know magic, but reputable houngans practice it only for good ends. Bokors (sorcerers) are not so scrupulous, dealing with the less savory voodoo gods. They are said to be priests “working with both hands.” Marcel Pierre, according to his reputation, has worked hard with the wrong hand.

A 1981 BBC documentary on the zombie phenomenon identified Pierre as a fomer member of the Tontons Macoutes, a dreaded secret police of the former president-for-life, Francois Duvalier. Moreover, the BBC said, Pierre is adept at making poisons and has admitted using them to kill people for money.

(Helmut Koller)

Davis holds the toxic puffer fish, which, when eaten, can induce a trancelike state. (Courtesy of Wade Davis)

“The BBC told me that Marcel Pierre is the incarnation of evil,” Davis had told me in Virginia, “and he simply isn’t. He’s not exactly benign… He went too far in the Tonton.” But, Davis said, Pierre had become his friend.

“Besides,” Davis asked, “if this guy is really the incarnation of evil, why is he living right among everybody? What is his role in the community? And then you get into what the purpose of sorcery is in African culture. It’s despised at the same time that it’s tolerated and considered essential, because there’s some kind of cosmic balance in the universe.”

THE SORCERER IS AT HOME when we call. A stern-faced man with inexpressive flat features, he leads our group into a cool, dark back bedroom, where he sits on a chair and asks us our business. He removes his dark glasses, revealing hooded eyes. He is wearing a yellow cap printed with the slogan, WILD WONDERFUL WEST VIRGINIA.

“I’d like to know if we can ask him a few questions,” I say to Melfort, who translates.

What do you want to ask about? he says.

I say we are en route to visit two zombies and are curious to know how and why zombies are made.

Narcisse is in Lestere, Pierre says.

“We know,” I say “That’s where we’re going.”

Pierre says he will lead us to the zombies, if we pay him. Melfort replies that we are just on a tour of the countryside today, and will return and see him tomorrow. I catch the drift of things and say thank you, we must be going.

Pierre follows us to the door.

You must walk with money to see the zombie, he says.

“Goodbye,” I say. “Nice to meet you.”

We are all in the car. Pierre leans in the window. When will you come back? he asks. Tomorrow afternoon, says Melfort. Jean-Claude puts the Jeep into gear and, without consulting me, turns south, back toward Port-au-Prince, away from our destination. He and Melfort are both shaken by their meeting with Pierre, and Wiggins and I don’t feel too great about the guy either. “He’s a very bad priestman,” says Melfort. “I don’t like his face. I don’t like to shake his hand. I don’t shake it when we left.”

We are still driving south, in the wrong direction. “We don’t want trouble with him,” Melfort explains. After a few minutes, Jean-Claude pulls off the road and turns back north. There is only one road, so we have to pass Pierre’s house. He is standing out front as we drive by. We see him and he sees us. Jean-Claude pulls off the road again and hesitates. Then he resumes driving north. We are all sweating in the car. Wiggins reaches into his pack of supplies and pulls out a canteen of New York City tap water.

We drive in silence until we reach the village of Lestere. Jean-Claude asks a man for directions, and he climbs in the car to show us the way. A hundred yards down a dirt road, a couple of turns, and we arrive at the edge of a hard, dusty clearing surrounded by small huts with corrugated-iron roofs. An old man wearing checked pants and, despite the heat, a long-sleeved rugby shirt, spots us and walks in our direction. Jean-Claude points to him and turns to me. “Zombie!” he says.

THE DOCUMENTATION of the zombification of Clairvius Narcisse was accomplished by Dr. Lamarque Douyon, one of Haiti’s leading (and only) psychiatrists. The trial that led Douyon to Narcisse began in 1957, when Douyon was studying psychiatry in Montreal. ��He was working with a doctor giving experimental drugs to schizophrenics and observing their behavior afterward. “They were just like marionettes,” recalls Douyon. “They had no initiative. They did whatever you told them to do. They were behaving like… zombies.”

Douyon concluded that the drugs could induce zombie-like behavior, and this intrigued him. During his next vacation in Haiti, he gathered a number of zombie cucumber (the hallucinogenic plant that has since turned out not to be the zombie poison but its counteragent) and took them back to Montreal with him. There he injected male mice with an extract from the plant. The mice became very passive for a couple of hours and then began to move normally again. After that, Douyon says, “I continued to interest myself in the zombie question.”

The day before our trip, Wiggins and I had found Douyon at his clinic in Port-au-Prince, next door to a line of people waiting to apply for visas at the American consulate. There was a crowd as well in Douyon’s waiting room. More than a dozen patients sat quietly, holding pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. “Dix-huit,” the nurse called shortly after Wiggins and I arrived. The patient holding number 18 got up and went into the doctor’s office.

While we waited, I browsed through the magazines on a waiting-room table and picked up a back issue of L’Assaut, the official organ of Jean-Claudisme, which is the political movement of President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier (and to which the American analogy would thus be Ronaldism). I was reading about how a recent visit by some black American businessmen “constituted a new victory for the politics of opening initiated and led by the President-for-Life of the republic” when Wiggins and I were called.

Douyon’s office was equipped with a psychiatric couch and a noisy air conditioner. The doctor sat behind his deask in a white medical coat and told us, in not quote perfect English with a French-Haitian accent, how he had pursued his interest in zombies after returning to Haiti.

“I was looking for the zombies,” he said. “I was traveling all over the country looking for a zombie. Everybody in Haiti was convinced that the zombie was a real thing. I met some priests, Protestant pastors, and a lot of tea teachers, and many of the affirmed that the zombie was something real, and they even had pupils or friends who were zombies. They meant there were people who died; they had been to the funeral of those people, and after a few years those people came back and lived in the community… Somebody would tell me that in this part of the country you would find a zombie, so I would travel over there and ask everybody. But myself I wasn’t able to see a zombie.”

Finally, in 1979, the Haitian press reported that a zombie had appeared near Gonaives. Douyon was off again. He met and interviewed Narcisse and his relatives. He went to the well-known Albert Schweitzer Hospital near Deschapelles and found a death certificate, signed by two doctors (one Haitian and one American), showing that Clairvius Narcisse had died there in 1962. He talked to people who had been at Narcisse’s funeral. He brought Narcisse to a private hospital he runs in Port-au-Prince and treated him for a year. “When he was in better condition,” Douyon said, “I took him back to Lestere, and he is still living there, with his sisters, and they all accept him and share their family life very well.”

Douyon was interrupted by a shouting from the waiting room and a knock at the door. He went out. When he returned I asked him about the crowd of patients outside. “They are psychotics,” he said.

I said they seemed awfully calm for psychotics.

“They are on drugs,” he explained, “except for the one who just arrived.”

On our way out a few minutes later, we saw that one. He was sitting, quietly now, in a chair in the waiting room. A chain was wrapped around his wrists and padlocked. Douyon turned to us with an embarrassed laugh. “They should not have done this,” he said.

Voodoo believers, when possessed, eat fire without harm. (E. Wade Davis)

Voodoo believers, when possessed, eat fire without harm. (Photo: Wade Davis)

IN THE NARCISSE FAMILY compound, we are greeted by an uproar. In a matter of seconds, a dozen people crowd around us, and one of Narcisse’s sisters, barefoot in a white dress with a toddler clutching her leg, begins screaming at Jean-Claude. He has told her that we are from Dr. Douyon. How is she supposed to know that, she shouts. How does she know we are who we say we are?

While she shouts, a neatly dressed old man appears with some wooden chairs and quietly sets them out beneath the shade of a tree in the center of the compound. He seems to know how the argument will end. The first person seated is Gracelle, another sister of Narcisse. When her sister stops for breath, Gracelle takes the argument in a new direction.

The family has incurred certain expenses caring for Narcisse, she says. She knows that interviews with Narcisse are worth a great deal of money to the movies in Canada and the United States. Narcisse is incapable of dealing with money, so we should deal directly with her. If we giver her $100, we can talk to Narcisse.

“Twenty dollars,” I say.

Out of the question, she snorts. How about $70?

I say okay.

Narcisse has been wandering around distractedly during all of this. Now he reappears in clean clothes —white pants, a blue striped shirt, and tennis shoes. He sits opposite us beneath the tree and, with all his relatives gathered around, begins to tell the story of his death.

Melfort translates:

“He get sick Sunday, and Tuesday they take him to the hospital. He gave a blow-up. He give blood.” (Narcisse gestures to show the blood gave forth out of his mouth.) “He is dead on Wednesday. When he is dead, he can hear his sisters cry, but he cannot talk.”

Well then, was he dead or wasn’t he dead?

“He thinks he is dead. Then he know he is dead because they put him in the coffin and in the ground. He know he is finished. He know he is gone forever.”

Narcisse leans forward in his chair. He has a high-domed bald head and sparse white whiskers on his face. He points to a scar at the corner of his mouth. It was made, he says, by a coffin nail. The man pounding the coffin shut drove a nail right into his face. “He is too big for the coffin,” Melfort explains.

While we listen, two goats are butting heads behind one of the huts. A gust of wind comes up and blows sand in our faces. Narcisse shields his eyes, which are yellow.

He was buried on the Wednesday he died, he continues, and he lay in his coffin until Saturday night, all the while breathing through his armpit. “When you zombie, you breathe there,” Melfort explains. Then the bokor and his assistants arrived at the graveyard. “They make a ceremony and invite the zombie to come. The top of the coffin fly away. The land opens. They tell the zombie to stand up. He stands up. They slap him in the face. They tie him with rope.”

Had he been poisoned? I ask.

No, says Narcisse, there was no poison. He died because an enemy put a watermelon in the ground and stuck it with a knife. This accounts for the pain in his chest and the red blood he spit up during his fatal illness.

A little naked boy from the waist down is standing next to Narcisse. Narcisse pauses, draws a little handkerchief out of his pocket, and wipes the child’s dirty nose. Then he continues:

After being summoned being summoned from the grave, he was led away to the farm of a bokor near Pilate. There he did agricultural work with 150 other zombies until, after two and a half years, a newly arrived zombie rose up and killed the bokor. Then Naricisse wandered off and continued to wander until the day in 1980 when he returned to Lestere and confronted his sisters in the marketplace, causing such a commotion that the local police locked him up for his own protection.

Why had he stayed and worked for the bokor?��

Because the bokor had taken his bon-ange, of course.�� (The bon-ange or ti-bon-ange is, according to voodoo, the part of the human soul that animates the personality of the individual.) “If the bokor not take his bon-ange,” Melfort says, “he would have sense and know where he are and would leave. But he no have his bon-ange. He cannot wake up his head.” He recovered his bon-ange after running away, Narcisse says, by eating salt, which, it is well known, restores the bon-ange to a zombie.

Everybody is listening to this tale, except for a few of Narcisse’s relatives, who have heard it many times before and begin to wander off. We move to leave as well, with Narcisse, who will accompany us on the rest of our trip.

As we walk towards the car, Gracelle calls after us, “Don’t forget to see his grave!”

We do not. A few miles down the road, we stop at an old village cemetery. Narcisse walks directly to a waist-high tomb and sits. He looks to one side, to where a heavy concrete slab is set in the ground. Written on the slab are the words, ICI REPOS CLAIRVIUS NARCISSE 3/5/62.

Narcisse says something to Melfort, and Melfort translates.

“He says he is in good shape now, but not as good as before he is dead.”

LATER IN THE DAY, Narcisse tells us more about the circumstances behind his death. It was engineered, he says, by his late brothers, who were lazy and good-for-nothing envied his industriousness. This differs a bit from the story Narcisse has told others—that his brothers and he were feuding about some land.

Both versions of the story were denounced by and expert we consulted later. “I could not imagine that someone would lie even beyond the tomb,” said Max Beauvoir, “but Clairvius Narcisse did.”

Beauvoir is a houngan who was trained as a biochemist at Cornell and the Sorbonne before returning to Haiti and taking up the priestly post he inherited from his grandfather. He presides over an attractively designed voodoo temple a few miles south of Port-au-Prince, where, every night, tourists are invited to view authentic voodoo ceremonies for $10. (Wiggins and I had attended one, during which a celebrant had bitten the head off a chicken and then been possessed by Agway, the voodoo god of the sea. Other celebrants put live coals in their mouths. “I’m impressed,” Wiggins had told Beauvoir, “and I’m from New York.”)

Zombies are not created randomly or as the result of petty feuds, said Beauvoir, who was an important consultant to the research of Wade Davis. Bokors are the leaders of secret societies, he said. One role of the societies is to uphold traditional law, and zombification is a sort of capital punishment for those who violate that law. “Those who make zombies,” Beauvoir said, “are the equivalent of executioners.”

In 1962, Clairvius Narcisse wanted to sell his share of a piece of land he and his siblings had jointly inherited from their father, Beauvoir said. Under official Haitian law, Narcisse had the right to do that. But it was a violation of traditional law, because it would have displaced some members of his family who lived off that land. Nevertheless, Beauvoir said, “Narcisse insisted. He was physically taken into the secret society. He was tried by his peers. He was given people to defend him. He was asked to change his mind. He still insisted, so he was made into a zombie.

(Every documented zombification has a similar story, Beauvoir said, and Wade Davis told me later that his research supported this conclusion. “There’s some random making of zombies, too,” Davis said. “But I believe that zombification is a form of social sanction…I know that Narcisse was judged.”)

Beauvoir confirmed, however, another poart of Narcisses’s story, that the means of his zombification was the removal of his ti-bon-ange by spiritual means. Poison is irrelevant to the making of a zombie, Beauvoir said. Some zombie makers use it “for support,” to buck up faith in their magic. “But zombification is purely a spiritual matter. One part of the soul, the ti-bon-ange, is removed using techniques that are well known.” He often removed the ti-bon-ange himself, Beauvoir said, in the course of preparing people for spiritual instruction. (But he always returned them afterward, he added.)

When the proper ritual is employed, Beauvor said, zombies can be created at a distance, with no direct contact between the bokor and the victim. Moreover, he said, a new trend in the field is to retrieve zombies from their graves at a distance as well. Only “small bokors of bad repute” bother to go digging up graveyards nowadays, Beauvoir said. “The best people will tell you they no longer raise zombies in cemeteries. You stay at home and command the zombies to come to you.”

DRIVING NORTH from Narcisse’s empty grave, listening to him (allegedly) lie from beyond the tomb, Wiggins signals that he is getting uncomfortable in the back seat. It is very hot, the back windows don’t open, and Wiggins is crammed in between one perspiring translator and a zombie. Meanwhile, I am getting hungry. It is time to take the zombie to lunch.

We stop in Gonaives and find and air-conditioned restaurant. The cool air bothers Narcisse; he prefers the heat, he says. But otherwise he has really loosened up. With his sisters, he was quiet and withdrawn. Now he is starting to have fun, spellbinding one and all with amazing tales of zombie life.

If anyone stole anything from the fields where he worked as a zombie, Narcisse tells us, the zombies would kill the thief. Narcisse killed one or two himself, he says. The waiter laughs. Narcisse orders Coca-Cola and grilled chicken.

When zombies get old, Narcisse tells us, they are turned into cows. Jean-Claude yelps and slaps the table in amazement. It’s true, says Narcisse. One Christmas Eve the bokor went off with a zombie and returned with a cow, which was cooked and served for dinner. In the morning the bokor told Narcisse and his fellow zombies, “You ate your brother last night.”

I have a question: Who was the little naked boy whose nose Narcisse so solicitously wiped back at the family compound?

His son, Narcisse says.

Now I am surprised. Narcisse is about 70 years old (he guesses), and he looks it. Moreover, he’s had a hard life. The little boy was about two. Narcisse sees my surprise and laughs.

“Yes,” Melfort repeats, “he makes babies. And the little on is not the last one. When he come back, his first wife doesn’t want him anymore. She say she’s not going to live together with a zombie. Now he has a young wife. He’ll show you his young wife.”

The waiter brings our food, and he has a question: ��“Did the father of the church accept to baptize the child?”

Narcisse says he’s not Catholic but Baptist, and the Baptist minister had no problem about baptizing a zombie’s children.

Narcisse eats heartily, carefully piling his cleaned chicken bones on Melfort’s salad plate. After lunch we drive off again toward a Baptist missionary compound in the village of Passe Reine. This is the home of Francina Illeus, the first zombie found by Dr. Douyon.

When we arrive, a crowd of young women and children is standing in the shade of a mango tree, enjoying some late afternoon conversation. The women know Narcisse. When they see him, they start to tease him good-naturedly. Is he married? Why doesn’t he marry to-Femme (Francina’s nickname)? Two zombies belong together.

“Ti-Femme!” the women shout at a pretty young woman at the edge of the crowd. Someone tells her to clean up. She ducks into a building and emerges a few minutes later in a clean flowered dress. Children have set out chairs beneath the mango tree and ti-Femme sits. But she will not talk to us.

A man in a Pizza Hut shirt tells her we come to take her to Dr. Douyon. She turns her head away and whispers, “Non. Non. Non.” She looks very unhappy. Melfort says we will pay her to talk to us. I catch her looking at me. She quickly turns away again. She whispers, “��ǲ�…n�ǲ�.“

Up to a point, Francina did what she was told. She washed, she dressed, she sat. But she will say nothing. She is not playing in our ballpark. She seems a million miles away, like a semi-catatonic, like a, yes, zombie.

On the road back to Lestere, everyone agrees that it is too bad about ti-Femme. The bokor still has her soul, Melfort says. Narcisse speaks and Melfort translates. “He says he is very lucky to come back and not be silly.

Then Narcisse tells us he is planning to visit Canada soon.

Will he take his young wife? I ask.

“No,” Melfort says, and he laughs. “Maybe he find another woman there, if she don’t know he is a zombie.”

Edward Zuckerman is the author of .

The post The Natural Life of Zombies appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

Amateurs Without Borders

sperkins-pom — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

IT'S EARLY FEBRUARY, and I'm sitting at home doing what many Americans are doing: feeling terrible for the people of Haiti and expressing it through the small, instant gesture of a $5 text-message donation.

On the ferry heading back to La Gonave

��

I want to do more, of course, but I also recognize a fact that comes up every time there's a major natural disaster somewhere: I don't have any of the specialized skillsrescue, medical, logisticalthat are really needed in these situations. While I can jury-rig a broken telemark binding just fine, I'm pretty much useless in an impact zone.

One morning, however, nosing around online, a story from Cruising World magazine's Web site causes me to perk up. An NGO called OceansWatch North America is organizing a flotilla of sailboats to deliver supplies to Haiti, and they need crew volunteers.

This I can do; I've got a bit of blue-water cruising experience. So I phone the CEO, a 60-year-old former meditation instructor and Aspen-based DJ named Sequoia Sun, vet him through a friend of his (a Greenpeace captain), and put my name on the list. Two days later, when another volunteer drops out, Sequoia invites me to take his place, and I happily skip to the front of the line.

Though I have a few small questions (Sequoia Sun? Aspen DJ?), I love the idea. Cut out the Red Crossstyle overhead and the fat-bellied military cargo planes. Instead, stack a loaner sailboat with donated goods, gather capable people, and sail south to deliver relief. This direct, adventurous approach seems like a radical paradigm shift.

Which it is. But at times it will also turn out to be a big, radical mess, and there will be moments when I'll wonder whether Iand the worldwould have been better served if I'd just stayed home and written a check.

ONE WEEK AFTER making the call, and a month after the quake, I find myself seated at a plastic picnic table in the backyard of a weathered bungalow in downtown Key West, Florida. We cruisers-with-a-cause, together for the first time, are finalizing our mission.

The boat we'll take is a stalwart 43-foot Westsail named Hiatus, its services donated by the owner, 58-year-old Captain Dan Wever, who's sitting beside me under rustling palms. Captain Dan sounds like a military officer, which he once was, in the Air Force. Across from him sits Sequoia, who looks uncommonly timid for a thickset man standing six-three. The two connected after Dan saw the same Cruising World piece I did, but they met for the first time just a couple of days ago.

Already there's friction, and the problem is obvious: Both men want to be in charge. The rest of the gang? Near a recycling bin overflowing with beer cans sits a 34-year-old woman named Tory Field, the thoughtful, nose-pierced co-founder of a community-supported vegetable farm in western Massachusetts. Also coming alongbut missing today because of a head coldis Gino Muzio, a slender, 54-year-old infectious-disease specialist from Naples, Italy, who used to work with Médecins Sans Frontières (a.k.a. Doctors Without Borders). We call him Dr. Gino.

Our destination is La Gonâve, a peanut-shaped island of 75,000 that escaped the worst of the quake but, because of its relative good fortune, attracted a flood of refugees; we've heard rumors of 15,000 to 40,000 hungry and homeless mainlanders turning up there. Little international aid had arrived by late January, prompting CNN to air a short segment calling La Gonâve “the forgotten island.”

Maybe half an hour into the meeting, we fire up a pictureless Skype connection and buzz our on-the-ground contact: Father Soner, a Haitian Episcopal priest based in Anse-à-Galets, a town in eastern La Gonâve. He says locals are still struggling to feed and care for their displaced countrymen. Tent cities remain. The only functioning ferries aren't carrying foodincoming refugees are using up all the spaceand water resources are strained to the limit.

“People are drinking water from the sea!” he tells us.

Our goal is to drop our foodthree tons of rice, beans, and flourwith Father Soner. Then, for a couple of days, Dr. Gino will help out in the small local hospital, with me acting as his assistant.

How we're going to do all this is trickier than expected, because, even now, who “we” are is unclear. As the meeting progresses, I find out that Sequoia hasn't exactly been forthcoming. OceansWatch is not the lead organizing body of this trip but, instead, is piggybacking on a plan created by the Conch Republic Navy, a decades-old club of salty Key Westers. Turns out the CRN collected all the donations, chose La Gonâve as the destination, and organized a flotilla of six boats. Sequoia had told me we would sail at the head of as many as two dozen OceansWatch vessels, but it turns out that only Captain Dan and Hiatus answered the call. Now we'll be the lead boat in the tiny CRN flotilla.

The switcheroo doesn't bother me, since the CRN seems full of pros, having delivered aid to more than half a dozen Caribbean disaster zones over the years. The next night, aboard Hiatus, we plow ahead, poring over nautical charts until we come up with a mutually agreeable route. We'll go the relatively safe and slow Bahamian way: 800 miles, eight days, if the winds favor us, racing across the Gulf Stream, gliding down the shallow postcard waters of the Bahamas and Exumas, and dashing over the Windward Passage to La Gonâve.

On February 11, a Thursday, we tie up at Western Union Dock and load. On deck we lash jerry cans of extra diesel and cooking oil, along with 20 pairs of donated crutches. About a dozen volunteers dolly 50-pound bags from shipping containers parked nearby, handing them down Hiatus's companionway via human assembly line. Captain Dan supervises, stacking the bags like Jenga pieces in the boat's interior spaces. Meanwhile, he and Sequoia argue about Hiatus's seaworthiness with so much extra weight.

“That's all that's going on,” Captain Dan barks at one point. “We're eight inches below waterline.”

“I'd like to see a couple more bags at the bow, so it's level for sleeping,” Sequoia says.

I have no idea how much Hiatus can take, but I'd guess she's at capacity. When I try to open the door to the head, I have to yank hard three times before it pops free from its warped jambwith a distinctive bwanggggggg.

ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14, we hoist canvas. Chips ahoy! Adding to the excitement is a schooner-rigged CRN sailboat named Drummer, crewed by three young friends who've decided to join us.

I've grown to like loudmouthed Captain Dan, especially after he informed me that he once singlehanded the length of the Bahamas with nothing but a compass, a depth sounder, a VHF radio, and the invigorating fantasy of hooking up with nurses. Sequoia's résumé, on the other hand, remains a mystery, his most charming revelation being that the name on his birth certificate is John Wayne. But there's plenty of time to get to know everyone, I figure.

Or not. Around midnight, the crew of Drummer alerts us that the wind is shifting fast. Captain Dan wakes Sequoia to tell him we need to leave now if we want to make it across the Gulf Stream without getting hammered by tall standing waves.

Bad idea. You don't wake Captain Queeg and tell him you've changed plans. After days of bickering and delays, he snaps, yelling, “Fuck you, you fucking asshole!”

Captain Dan, menacingly quiet: “I want you off my vessel, body and possessions.”

Eventually, Captain Dan leaves the decision to the crew, and, like contestants on Survivor, we unanimously decide there can be only one chieftain, and Sequoia isn't it. At 4:30 A.M., with our boats idling a couple of miles offshore, I escort him and his coffin-size duffels toward the lights of Drummer, whose crew has no idea what just happened (because we don't tell them). The boat seems immeasurably lighter without him.

AFTER ARRIVING LATE in Nassau on Tuesday, February 16, we shove off as soon as possible the next morning, on a two-day run south toward Georgetown. With Captain Dan on the foredeck lookout, we surf downwind, the sandy seafloor skimming past just a couple of feet below. Whenever Dan spots a black island of coral in the spearmint-colored water, he raises a certain number of fingers and points to port or starboard, and I steer the same number of degrees in that direction. The patches of coral heads grow tighter as we get in sync, and soon we're slaloming along like a 20-ton rally car, with Drummer hours behind us. But when night falls, the wind shifts out from behind the bottom of the Exumas andbam!we're in a dead downwind run. Choppy seas. Tough sleeping. Sharing a comforter and tumbling from side to side on a bed of flour sacks, Tory and I pass out for six seconds at a time.

“It'd take years to get eight hours of sleep like this,” she groans.

We limp into Georgetown on Thursday, February 18. Drummer arrives some 12 hours later, and her exhausted captain decides to rest until the main CRN flotilla arrives, in a few days. Rubbed the wrong way one too many times by Sequoia, they also decide to kick him off.

Already short on time, we commence the final push alone the next morning, hoping for a single three-day tack southeast. The wind direction stays fairly steady, but the masthead anemometer spins 30 knots, or three times the NOAA forecast, and a disconcerting amount of seawater starts leaking in through our rudder housing. Unfortunately, there's no way to fix it while under way.

Trying to act as casual as possible, Captain Dan stuffs our passports and other essentials into an emergency bag in case we have to abandon ship. Tory pumps the bilge. Dr. Gino, at the height of what has turned out to be a respiratory infection, musters enough energy to opine, “I wish it was Monday.”

I find myself fatalistic and too nauseated to volunteer for the 4-to-6 A.M. watch, so I'm on the night shift. Night watches have their virtuesphosphorescents peel off the bow in a V, twinkling like starsbut I find them stressful, too. The globe-shaped compass glows red. Wind thrums across the sails in a low moan. The boat surges into blackness. The whole arrangement feels tenuous.

Not knowing more than a couple of Coast Guard light signals, I'm constantly confused. How close are those pinpoint lights, and are they trying to tell me something? Even after a $4,000, ten-day cruising course, I still can't figure that out. All I know is that the emergency beacon hanging on our tiller post flashes like Morse code, reminding me that A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G C-A-N G-O W-R-O-N-G.

Soon, it does.

On Sunday, February 21, I wake to find that Otto, as I've nicknamed our ever-reliable autopilot, has burst a hydraulic line in the middle of the Windward Passage. Tory struggles to hand-steer, while Captain Dan, tools in hand, bangs around in a dark narrow hatch. Dr. Gino, utterly wasted, falls asleep between handing Dan paper towels to wipe away the squirting oil.

Half an hour later, right before Dan climbs on deck, justly triumphant at having somehow revived Otto, a red-and-white Coast Guard helicopter appears low on the horizon, maching toward us from Haiti, its jet turbine howling. They must've seen our erratic course on a high-powered radar, but we have no idea why they've come to save us. The State Department doesn't encourage or support private ventures to Haiti.

“Coast Guard helicopter, this is sailing vessel Hiatus,” I shout into the handheld radio.

“Go ahead, Hiatus,” it replies, hovering low off our mast, rotor wash riffling the water.

“Uh, I think we're gonna be OK,” I stammer, “but thank you so much for checking on us!”

“Roger that,” replies the deepest, calmest voice I've ever heard. “Coast Guard helo standing by on 16.”

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, at 7 A.M. on Monday, February 22, we've hit the calm waters of Haiti, gone for our first swim beside beautiful chalky cliffs along the northwestern peninsula, and arrived at Anse-à-Galets, La Gonâve.

Father Soner, whose bald head we recognize from a crinkled snapshot, steps forward from the dozens of silent locals milling about on the cement pier and greets us kindly. In no time, a string of young men unload what took us a full morning to get aboard. Soon after that, we're settled into the dorm rooms of the Episcopal Church compound. Now that we're finally here, the first thing I want to do is talk to Soner about how he will distribute our food.

Thankfully, it turns out he has a straightforward and trustworthy method. He and the police hand out dated chit cards to hungry families, register the distribution in a log, and then pass out the food in sequence from his secure compound. So far it's all in keeping with my fantasywe arrived just in time!but over the next few days, as I explore Anse-à-Galets and the outlying townships, I have difficulty squaring his initial description of La Gonâve with what I observe.

At first, I'm simply overwhelmed by new impressions. Loud church services. Goatherds and lazy unattended pigs. Innumerable money-transfer centers guarded by men swinging shotguns. Beautiful white-stone beaches. Every pickup piled high with hitchhikers or 50-pound bags of something. A small kid in tattered shorts, wearing an oversize T-shirt that reads, in jaunty letters, YOU CAN'T AFFORD ME.

The island has no newspaper, so hard information is tough to come by, but the more I look around, the more Father Soner's old Skype descriptions seem off. People in Anse-à-Galets are not drinking water from the sea but from one of at least 16 public fountains, which appear to flow clear and cool. Ferries sail to the mainland daily and deliver, among other goods, large pallets of Coke. I don't see all of La Gonâve, but our situation appears almost absurd after Dr. Gino visits the hospital, which has 23 paid staff and, at present, a total of 20 patients.

“Where are all the refugees?” I ask Father Soner.

“They came immediately, two or three days after the earthquake,” he says. “When they came, they were not receiving good help in Port-au-Prince. But after a few weeks, they began to go back home.”

So how many are left? No one knows. But whatever the number, our roughly 6,000 pounds of food is comparatively insignificant. Between the quake and our arrival, the “forgotten island” received quite a bit of relief, it turns out.

In the week before our arrival, West Indies Self Help, a missionary-run, evangelical development organization based in La Gonâve, procured two shipments of food totaling 124,000 pounds. Lemon Aid, a Scottish charity (based in a former lemonade factory), brought 7,300 pounds of food and medicine. The sailors of the USS Bunker Hill, a guided-missile cruiser, brought MREs and thousands of gallons of drinking water. Members of the Wesleyan Church, an international evangelical congregation with local operations, procured 130,000 pounds of food and cooking oil. The Venezuelan government sent diesel fuel to run generators.

The list goes on. Supposedly, 36 other NGOs are at work on the island. And that's just what I've heard about.

Nonetheless, I'm glad I came. Father Soner might have overdramatized the situation, but he didn't maliciously bamboozle us. In one month, the CRN and OceansWatch have somehow made contact on a remote Haitian island, solicited thousands of dollars' worth of aid, organized volunteers, and gotten us safely here. I'm ecstatic not to find Gonâvians orange-haired with malnutrition but saddened to discover that our direct aid ended up so confused. Falling asleep at night, I struggle to find some sort of bigger takeaway.

TECHNICALLY, OUR MISSION is complete. Soon, Captain Dan and Dr. Gino will head for home, the jib and mainsail shredding in a gale near Jamaica and blowing out again near Florida. Tory will work the next month in a social-justice organization in Port-au-Prince. Sequoia will tell me later that he caught a ride out of Georgetown and distributed some aid to an island in southern Haiti. Feeling successful, he will confess that he'd never captained a sailboat more than 50 miles offshore and that his full legal name isGod's truthJohn Wayne Edmister. (Not long after, I'll also learn that the board of OceansWatch North America has found that his actions “were not consistent with the desire or intent of the organization” and asked him to resign.)

Me? I detour to Port-au-Prince for two days. I'm exhausted, but after the confusion of La Gonâve, I have a deep desire to go to the epicenter, to see firsthand what a full-scale natural disaster looks likeand perhaps put our mission in better perspective. I ferry to the mainland, take a bus to the edge of the capital, and hire the first taxi that knows the location of the CNN compound, figuring I can talk my way inside if anything goes wrong. Hardly necessary. Guytho, the driver of the early-nineties Mitsubishi Lancer, turns out to be a champ. The 26-year-old father of two speaks almost no English but calls his 24-year-old buddy to translate. Osnel worked as a schoolteacher before the quake, speaks fluent English, and, when I find out that all the hotels are booked or broken, will secure us a place to sleep in a tent in the driveway of an abandoned NGO.

We spend the morning touring downtownthe palace, the church, random streets. The oft-reported smell of death has finally blown away on the sea breeze. The roads are clear, but the demolition has yet to begin, let alone the rebuilding. Afraid to stay inside their homes, seemingly everyone mills around outside. From the window of Guytho's not-so-fast taxi, we see tidy rows of tents and USAID tarps and shiny UN vehicles. Helicopters chopper overhead constantly. A long row of clean Sani-Can toilets shame those used at the New York City Marathon. I develop a new appreciation for Médecins Sans Frontières, which, alone among aid agencies, seems to hire lots of locals and operate on a shoestring budget. They'll slap a sticker on the door of a busted-up truck, give the badass driver a couple bucks, and call it an MSF tanker. Overall, the organization of aid appears impressive, at least for a capital not two months removed from a 7.0 earthquake.

Hungry, we pick up some bread, cheese, and tomatoes at the grocery store.

“Let's go to a park,” I suggest, imagining a picnic. Dumb. Forget about grassy fields. Any open space is full of tents.

Walking the less tidy outskirts in the afternoon, it becomes apparent that all is not perfect. Aid has not reached everyone in the north-central Delmas neighborhood, for example. Residents of those hardscrabble tent cities on hand-cleared lots complain about a lack of drinking water and worry that their lean-to's, made of bedsheets, won't hold up in the rainy season. Not wanting to be overlooked, they name their squats with cardboard signs: CAMP 003: WE NEED HELP.

In the early evening, we wind through a warren of alleyways talking to people who used to live in tight apartments.

“Koman ou rele?” I ask one woman in tentative Haitian Creole.

“Geurda,” she says.

Geurda is in her early twenties, with unflinching, streetwise eyes. She's standing by what looks like a hallway of rubble, no more than ten feet wide, with tabletop-size chunks of cement piled in a jumble. It used to be her apartment.

When the quake struck, her two-year-old was asleep in the front room beside her three-month-old, whom she'd just bathed.

“She was so afraid she couldn't move,” translates Osnel. “Then a lot of cement blocks fell on her and she couldn't move to save the children.”

“Has she received any help?” I ask.

“No.”

I'd like to ask what she needs, where she sleeps, if she knows anyone who fled to La Gonâve, etc., but when I launch into my thousand questions, she looks away. Osnel and I say goodbye and move down the alley. Clearly, she's not eager to talk. And, anyway, as Osnel informs me, we have many, many more people to meet.

The post Amateurs Without Borders appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

��ϳԹ�� Icons

sperkins-pom — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Anderson Cooper

MORE AC

To read ��ϳԹ��'s complete interview with Anderson Cooper, go to outsideonline.com/andersoncooper.

Eyewitness
[42, NEW YORK CITY]
You were in Port-au-Prince less than 24 hours after the quake. With a tragedy of this scale, where do you start?
You just turn the camera on and open your eyes. No matter what direction you move, you keep the camera rolling. It's all happening in real time and goes on for days like that. Each morning you go out and think, OK, I'm going to look for a rescue, or, I'm going to go to a cemetery, but invariably you never get there, because so much comes across your path.

Do you sleep?
The first couple of days, you really don't. You shoot all day, and spend the nighttime editing and writing. But frankly, you don't think about that stuff, because it's so overwhelming.

Watching your reports, it seemed like anger might have become the dominant emotion among Haitians.
I think first there's the shock and horror of it all, and then you see how things play out. It doesn't get better, and the local government is completely not meeting the needs of its citizens, so there are a lot of things that anger people. Those are the people we talk to all day long. It's not so much what I think about it; it's more what I'm hearing from people. Why are people dying stupid deaths? A child doesn't need to die from an infection from a broken leg.

Is part of your role to broadcast that rage?
It's not so much that I'm broadcasting rage. I'm there to bear witness to what's happening. There's really nothing sadder than a child dying and no one knowing the suffering and pain of the loved ones left behind. And I think there's value in documenting that and giving voice to it.

There's been criticism directed at you and some of your CNN colleagues for overstepping your roles as objective journalists and getting involved in the story. At one point, you jumped into a crowd of looters to pull out an injured boy.
To be in places before relief workers are there: That presents some unique challenges. You suddenly find yourself in a situation where, say, you're a doctor—what do you do? There are some journalism purists who say that you do nothing, that you just go watch and report, and I certainly understand that. But in the case of the little boy [in Haiti] who got hit in the head with a cement block, no one was helping him. He couldn't get up. He'd try to get up and collapse. Blood was pouring from his head…It was a split-second decision to take him out of the situation. I think anyone would have done the same thing if they had the opportunity.

What kinds of stories make you want leave the studio and jump on a plane?
I tend to be drawn to stories that aren't on people's radar. When I was a kid, I used to look at old maps with unexplored regions. I find it interesting that with all the technology we have today, there are still places that don't make headlines. The situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo is one I've traveled to report on a lot. There are six million people who have died in the Congo in the past ten years. It's the deadliest conflict since World War II, but very few people know much about it. It's truly horrific.

We ran a piece recently by Nicholas D. Kristof, arguing for the need to find hopeful stories within a tragedy to get people's attention. Is that something you try to do?
I believe in telling the reality of what's happening. And some nights there isn't much to be hopeful for. But even the first day after the quake in Haiti, before the rescue crews got there, [we filmed] people rescue a little girl. That was a positive thing.

What effect do the things you witness have on you personally? Is it traumatic?
There was a time when I first started, when I made a fake press pass and borrowed a camera and headed into wars, and for three years that was the only kind of story I was interested in doing. It definitely takes a toll. You have to be very conscious of its effects and try to take a break when you need to.

There's also the inherent danger you're dealing with for prolonged periods.
I'm far more acutely aware of my surroundings than my friends who have regular jobs. I'm acutely aware of who's around and what the possibilities are. It changes the way you see your surroundings. But I don't seek out dangerous situations. I'm pretty much a chicken. Truly, I don't believe [my team has] taken any risks.

What about when you were younger?
My first three years, I can't believe some of the things I did. The idea of going to Somalia alone, not having a place to stay or security. I was 23 or 24. There was fighting between different clans in the city. I literally landed on the airstrip and had no idea about the town. A truckload of gunmen approached me, and I ended up hiring them as my gunmen, and we went around to the burial grounds where all these bodies were being dumped, and there were all these empty pits. I was thinking, They could just shoot me and put me in a pit and no one would ever know.

Were you just naive?
I don't think I was naive; I just didn't allow fear to stop me from going to a place. I don't believe you should be ruled by fear in anything in your life. I don't like anything that scares me, and I prefer to face it head-on and get over it. Anyone who says they're not scared is a fool or a liar or both. I just don't want that fear in my stomach to be part of my life, so I work to eliminate it.

Some of the athletes we talk to seem to crave the adrenaline that goes with fear.
I think it's a little different. I have no interest in jumping out of an airplane, or any of the things people do for thrills to push their limits and all that. To me, that seems foolish, and there's no point. If people are suffering in a place, to me, it's not a question of whether I'm going to go or not, it's a question of how fast can I get there?

��ϳԹ�� Icon: Ivan Watson

Chaos Correspondent

Jonathan Torgovnik/Reportage by Getty Images for CNN

[34, ISTANBUL]
Cooper isn't the only guy in a tight T-shirt reporting live from Haiti these days. CNN recently poached Ivan Watson from National Public Radio. Here's his take on the crisis in Haiti:”You don't have someone you can be angry at in Haiti. There's little more you can do than shake your fist at the sky. This is real 'wrath of God' stuff. Yesterday they gave me a mandatory day off. I wasn't allowed to work. You go at a sprint for five days, and then your body starts to deteriorate. I've never covered anything this big—the amount of human suffering, the loss. It was so overwhelming that I couldn't process it at first. But then it became clear that it was a duty to get some word out about this place. The only way I could deal with the bodies stacked up was to put on the journalistic lens. The scale of the damage was so huge that I couldn't pretend to pitch in. There was a girl who was in trouble, and I didn't drop everything to help. We reported on her and we were running from one place to another. I checked up on her later and didn't expect this little girl to die. If it had happened three days later, and I had been capable of understanding what the hell was going on, I would have tried to do everything to save this trapped girl but…didn't. It will haunt me forever.”

��ϳԹ�� Icon: Sonnie Trotter

Rock Star

Sonnie Trotter

[30, SQUAMISH, B.C.]
A lot of climbers drill permanent safety bolts into the rock every six or seven feet, but we're going back and doing trad routes the way they would've been done back in the seventies. We've nicknamed it “retro-trad.” Some outstanding climbs would've never been bolted if they weren't 5.14. Only now, climbing that hard on trad gear—stoppers, cams, and nuts that are placed into cracks and then removed—is relatively normal. So that's what we're doing. When I was 16, I saw footage of Peter Croft doing a climb like this in Yosemite. It was a 5.13 finger crack, and it had bolts on it. He ignored them. It just seemed to make sense to me. You can turn a lot of sport climbs into really dangerous trad climbs, but I'm looking for lines with big, bold features—the ones that scream out from across the valley. Maybe they have history. These I find worthy of the challenge. And, of course, they help me hone my skills for my own first ascents.

Trotter, who's climbed trad routes as hard as 5.14c, spent March establishing new routes on Mexico's 2,500-foot El Gigante.

��ϳԹ�� Icon: Lynsey Dyer

Huck Doll

(Photograph by Jace Rivers)

[28, JACKSON HOLE]
The more skiing becomes a job, the less you get to ski for fun. I used to feel like I had to prove myself all the time. It was kind of like “Hold my beer. Watch this.” It's always good to stomp those giant airs, but the skiing part has become underappreciated. A lot of the time, just getting to the cliff is the burliest part of the line, the part that shows whether you're a legit skier. When you watch somebody ski fluidly from top to bottom, that's what makes you want to go do it. Most of the big lines I've skied so far have been around Jackson. But there's nothing like Alaska. I've put a lot of time in up there but still haven't gotten my dream opportunity. All the guys are champing to get up there. They have seniority and dictate what's going on—whether you get on a helicopter that's going to the best places. I just want to keep putting my time in, so when I get the call I'm ready. When women are given a chance, you'll be impressed.

Dyer, a former Junior Olympic gold medalist, left racing to ski the biggest cliffs and steepest faces for the cameras of Warren Miller and Teton Gravity Research. She's the co-founder of , which aims to increase female participation in sports.

��ϳԹ�� Icon: Reid Stowe

Marathon Mariner

Reid Stowe

[58, ADRIFT]
There are many reasons I decided to do this voyage, but they've changed a lot since I first conceived of it, in 1986, and left land in 2007. I've been at sail for more than a thousand days now—the longest sea voyage without resupply in history. But I still have months and months to go, so I can't celebrate. I'm trying not to look ahead, but right now it seems as if I don't have a home. This boat is the only home I have, and it's been beaten up in every way. At the beginning of the voyage, I was hit by a ship on autopilot, so I've sailed this whole time with a partially disabled boat. I capsized at one point, but I kept going. In a way, I succeeded through the power of love, because if you truly love what you're doing, you can succeed at whatever you do. I've learned a lot about myself by being separated from society for so long. I've learned that we as humans must explore. We must see and discover new things or we degenerate. My hope is that this voyage will inspire people to overcome their fears and follow their dreams—to explore. I kept going because I had to. What else could I do?

Stowe was on day 1,003 at sea when we reached him via sat phone. He'd been sailing back and forth between the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans. He plans on docking his 70-foot schooner, Anne, at New York City this June.

��ϳԹ�� Icon: Lewis Gordon Pugh

Sea Lion

(Photograph by Michael Walker)

[40, LONDON]
I started out wanting to swim in places where nobody had swum before: Antarctica, the Arctic, all the bloody-cold places. I wanted to be a pioneer, a descendent of Scott and Amundsen, except an explorer of the oceans. I think I was born to swim, but standing on the ice edge at the North Pole in just a Speedo and goggles, I was terrified. You dive in and the water's 28 degrees—colder than what killed the Titanic's passengers—and it's like a death zone. It feels like somebody punched you in the stomach. You cannot breathe. Your skin is on fire. But doing this also gives me an opportunity to shake the lapels of world leaders who aren't taking the environment seriously. In 2008, I swam north of Spitsbergen and was so shocked by how thin the sea ice had become I called Gordon Brown on my satellite phone. We had a long chat. Shortly after, he appointed a climate-change minister in Britain.

In May, Pugh will attempt a one-kilometer swim through the near-freezing waters of an unnamed lake, at about 18,000 feet at the foot of Everest.

��ϳԹ�� Icon: Maya Gabeira

Giant Rider

Maya Gabeira (Photo by Linny Morris)

[23, OAHU]
The first time I saw a really big wave was at Waimea, at the Eddie Aikau invitational. I was 17 and had just moved to Hawaii from Brazil. I wanted to live on my own. I wanted to figure out who I was and what I really wanted in life. I knew that day that I wanted to surf those waves. After a year of sitting in the lineup with the boys, I caught my first big one—maybe 15 feet—and everything just felt right. I was so focused and in the moment. I loved it. Soon enough I was surfing big waves all over the world. I ended up at Teahupoo, in Tahiti. I was really nervous. I took two big wipeouts, either of which could have ended my career. But it didn't feel right to sit on my board and look stupid, to give up. So my partner, Carlos Burle, towed me out again, and I caught one. People criticized me for taking those risks, for getting in over my head. And, yes, in the beginning I did take a lot of risks, but in the beginning you have to take those risks. How else do you make it? How else do you realize your dreams?

Last August, Gabeira surfed a 45-footer at Dungeons, South Africa, the largest wave ever ridden by a woman—which makes her a shoo-in for her third consecutive Billabong XXL title.

��ϳԹ�� Icon: Cody Townsend

Water…Skier

(Courtesy of Salomon/Eric Aeder)

[26, SANTA CRUZ]
A little over a year ago, Mike Douglas and I came up with the idea to ski on waves. We're both longtime surfers and professional skiers, so the idea came naturally. Very few people knew about the project when we arrived in Maui. We were sure we'd get blasted out of there as kooks if locals heard about some haoles trying to ski on waves, but everyone was supportive. The technology is pretty far behind. It's like skiing on hickory skis 50 years ago. We used alpine ski boots and super-fat wake skis. After one ride, a wave sucked me down and gave me the worst hold-down of my life. I was standing on a reef below the surface. Even with a life jacket on, I couldn't get up. My skis felt like 200-pound weights on each leg. But we also got up to 25-second rides on some big waves with 20-foot faces. It felt like skiing on top of a slow, wet avalanche. It'd be the easiest way ever to get barreled. On a surfboard, you often get spit out, but on skis you can stall out in the tube. By the end of the trip we knew exactly what equipment we'd have to design to make it better.

Townsend is a professional skier, surfer, and watersports innovator.

��ϳԹ�� Icon: Nikki Kimball

Endurance Predator

(Photograph by Tim Kemple)

[38, BOZEMAN, MONTANA]
Fun? The race? Fun? Yeah, there were parts of it that were fun. One time, five of us were running along the singletrack and saw this wasp nest, and there was nothing we could do but run through it. (You can't go off-trail, because the jungle's too thick.) These hornets were as long as your little finger—huge. You just heard swearing in five different languages. It was hilarious in a warped kind of way. It's not always painful. I was 27 when I started entering trail races. I'm a slow runner, but I can run for a really long time. It's like hiking at a faster pace. You get to see so much more country, and race organizers are always holding these things in amazing places. It's very social for me. I never took the racing seriously until the press noticed that I had a six-year winning streak. I think each person has a finite number of world-class performances in them.

Starting in 1999, Kimball went seven consecutive years without losing an ultramarathon, including the U.S. national championships. She just returned from winning Brazil's 150-mile Jungle Marathon.

��ϳԹ�� Icon: Teresa MacPherson and Banks

Guiding Lights

Teresa MacPherson

Teresa MacPherson and Banks

[57 and 6, FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA]
I went to Port-au-Prince with the second wave of people from our task force with Banks, my 65-pound black Labrador, who is trained to find living people. The rubble went on for miles and miles. Helicopters were continually overhead. Rescue teams were everywhere. We used the dogs to discover people trapped in difficult-to-reach places. Banks crawled into voids, tunneling through an unstable environment where no human could go. He barked when he detected the scent of a living person. It could be seven days before an extrication was complete. The doctors said the victims were probably able to survive because they were used to subsisting on so little. The best canine story in Haiti was about a dog that ran out of its search area and began barking at a wall. They bored a hole in it and stared into the face of a three-year-old, dehydrated but alive. That was a 100 percent dog find. I often wondered if our training would be good enough for a disaster of this magnitude. Would the dogs just go, Are you kidding me? But Banks totally did his job. Our group made 16 rescues, a new record for us. Thankfully, we made a difference.

Virginia Task Force One canine search specialist Teresa MacPherson manages FEMA's disaster dog program. She and her Labs have worked in the aftermaths of the Oklahoma City bombing and hurricanes Ike and Katrina.

This article originally appeared as Parting Shot in ��ϳԹ��'s April 2010 issue.

��ϳԹ�� Icon: Rolando Garibotti

Silent Master

[39, JACKSON HOLE]
Am I media shy? I don't make sponsorship money or apply for grants. I make a living as a guide, and that works well enough. I don't object to media after the fact, but I'm always surprised when people promote a climb before doing it, because it's difficult to deal with the pressure of those expectations. The Torre Traverse [Patagonia's Cerro Standhardt, Punta Herron, Torre Egger, and Cerro Torre] took me almost three years. I dedicated all of my time to it. The reason Colin Haley and I pulled it off is because we're very good at planning, not because we're particularly good climbers. We had barely enough food and were barely warm enough. We asked to withdraw the climb from the Piolet d'Or [mountaineering's highest award] in early 2009. That was the second time I'd done that. The first was for a new route on Cerro Torre, in 2005. I just thought the idea that somebody would win this Piolet d'Or was ridiculous. I'm down here with Haley, again. We have an idea, but I don't know if we'll pull it off this year, so I think I'll keep it to myself.

Garibotti has held the record for the Grand Traverse—climbing ten Teton peaks—since 2000, with a time of 6:49.

��ϳԹ�� Icon: Trip Jennings

River Lover

[27, PORTLAND, OREGON]
There's no road map that shows you how to make a living as a kayaker and filmmaker, but last December I knew I had done it when I paid my cell-phone bill on time. The idea behind my first film, Bigger Than Rodeo, was to blend environmental activism and cutting-edge whitewater. I drove around the country in a '96 Subaru Impreza and maxed out three credit cards while showing footage of a paddler running a 105-foot waterfall. It took three more films and two more credit cards to figure out a combination of adventure and activism that worked. You don't get an interesting job by filling out an application; you commit to your dream the same way you do a waterfall: pick your line and dive headfirst. I'm glad I did it. In the past two years, my filming expeditions to Papua New Guinea, China, the Congo, Bolivia, Canada, and Brazil have been paid for through a partnership with National Geographic and the International League of Conservation Photographers. In the next six months I'm scheduled to shoot one film about elephant poaching in the Congo and another about kayaking in Laos. I created my dream job. It all started because I spent a year living out of a moldy Subaru and poaching continental breakfasts at cheap motels.

In 2008, Jennings led a team down the rebel-infested lower Congo, the last of the world's great unrun rivers. His films for National Geographic TV use kayaks to access Class V rivers in the service of science.

The post ��ϳԹ�� Icons appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

Anderson Cooper: The Full Interview

sperkins-pom — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

��ϳԹ�� editor Chris Keyes sits down with TV's most adventurous anchor.

KEYES: You just got back from two weeks in Haiti after the earthquake. What's going through your head when you leave a place like that?
COOPER: It's really hard leaving. I stayed an additional week, and so did my team. You feel very privileged and frankly lucky and honored to be in a situation where you're working on a situation that is clearly important. It's life and death, its every real and it's happening all around you and around the clock. It feels like you're in the place you want to be and need to be and leaving the people you're been following or you've met they can't leave, they're there and it's a strange thing to come back to you life and for me its been 2 and a half weeks of life changing momentous events, and you come back and you see your friends, and for them its been just another 2.5 weeks that have gone by and it's a strange adjustment that I've made before, but it's always uncomfortable. I've already started planning to go again in the next 2 or 3 weeks.

Your last Twitter posts were about seeing bodies being stacked up on access an road. I don't want to read into a 140-character tweet, but it sounded like a combo of exhaustion and exasperation. Is that fair?
Once they collected the bodies of people who died, we wanted to see what they were doing with them, so we tracked down what they were doing with the bodies, where their mass graves were dug. We went back to follow up on another story two weeks later, and I was stunned to find that some of the people were put into pits and buried over, but a lot of people were just dumped on the ground. I mean, literally dumped on the side of this road. I've seen a lot of really bad things and this was truly horrific. A bulldozer could have at least bulldozed these bodies into a pit and at least buried them. They went through the trouble of blocking the access roads so people couldn't see it, and it took a little work to be able to see it, and there's no reason for that.

I get the sense that, when covering these natural disasters, that at first there is no one to blameit's not a human conflict or a war with two sidesbut that over the course of the story, you begin to see things that you feel are being handled wrongly? How does that influence how you cover a story?
There's a learning curve for a lot governments and people on disasters like this and something like an earthquake is more unexpected than a hurricane is, and I think there's the shock and horror of it all, and when you see how things play out, it doesn't get better, and the local government is completely not meeting the needs of its people and frankly wasn't meeting the needs of it people before the earthquake so there's certainly a lot of things that anger people who are suffering through this, and those are the people we talk to all day long, and we let people know how people on the ground are feeling about it. It's not so much what I think about it, its more what I'm hearing form people. Why are people dying stupid deaths that don't need to occur; a child doesn't need to die from an infection from a broken leg.

Is part of your role there to broadcast that rage?
It's not so much that I'm broadcasting rage. I try not to take positions or allow the way I see something I'm expressing people's frustration and giving voice to what you see. The reason I'm there is to bear witness to what's happening. There's really nothing sadder than a child dying and no one knowing that child's name and not knowing the suffering and pain of the loved ones left behind. And I think there's value in documenting that and giving voice to it and letting people around the world know that this person died and they didn't have to die, and this is the impact it's had on their family and this is the impact it'll have on the rest of their lives and tomorrow more people are going to die and tonight more people are going to die.

You have a studio that allows you to report regularly from the field. What defines a story that makes you want to jump on a plane and leave New York City immediately?
I personally tend to be drawn to stories that aren't paid much attention to, or stories that aren't on people's radar. The situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo is one I've traveled to a lot both on my personal time and for CNN and 60 Minutes. There are six million people who have died in the Congo in the past 10 years. It's the deadliest conflict since WWII but very few people know much about it. When I was a kid I used to look at old maps with unexplored regions on them. I was always interested in central Africa and places that no longer exist or have changed names. But I was interested in sort of learning about the places on the map that were not really filled in. I find it interesting in this day and age that there are places that remain not talked about. They don't make headlines. To me, six million people is extraordinary, it's horrific, and hundreds of thousands of women being gang raped, things which we become, people become immune to it, and we shouldn't become immune to it.

Why do people become immune to it?
There are some things which are so horrific that some people feel they can't do anything about it that the natural, understandable response is to tune it out. If you feels there's not much you can do about it and it's truly horrific a person being gang raped by a group of solders and then have a solder pulling the trigger and blowing them open, looking at that and dealing with the aftermath of thatthese are things no one wants to have to think about. Yet, it happens to people, and I think it's important to bear witness to that, to shine a light on it, to learn who's doing that and what happens to survivors and show their strength and their courage.

We ran a piece recently by Nick Kristoff, about compassion psychology, and how he came to learn over time how to tell certain kinds of hopeful stories that had a better chance of motivating readers. Research has shown that people want a hopeful story, and that if you give them the bare facts of the tragedy, they are too liable to tune out. Does that influence the kind of stories you seek out when you go out to report? Beyond bearing witness, do you feel the need to tell a hopeful story?
I think it's sort of in the mix of stories you end up telling. I have the benefit of a two-hour program where we have the space to tell a variety of stories. Frankly I gravitate toward things which are I believe in telling the reality of what's happening. And some nights there isn't much to be hopeful for. And it's hard to find that. I'm ok with that you don't want to package things in a way that gives the wrong impression, ever, and I don't think nick does that at all. There are always hopeful things that you find. Even the first day after the quake, before the rescue crews got there, people rescued a little girl and that was a positive hopeful thing she was dug out by her family, friends and neighbors. I do think it's an important thing to show that even in the midst of darkness there is light, and people do survive things that many of us think no one could possible survive. I think those stories should be told as well.

How do you deal with the psychological effects of what you're seeing through your reporting? Do you have to take time to deal with the emotions of it?
For me, it hasn't really been an issue, but I know plenty of people in this profession who do. It dependsif you're on a steady diet of doing this kind of story, war correspondents, they spend years covering it, that takes a toll. I think news organizations are opening up and learning how to deal with it. People need time or need to talk to somebody.There was a time when I first started when I made a fake press pass and borrowed a camera and headed into wars, and for three years, that was the only kind of story I was interested in doing. It definitely takes a toll. After a time, I decided, look, I need to tell a variety of kind of stories and do stuff here in the US and not just overseas and focus on having a good life, not just an interesting professional life. So I do think you have to be very conscious of its effects and try to take a break when you need to, or whatever it may be.

You've said you have a warped sense of danger. How much of that is innate, and how much is a tolerance built up by experience?
I have a pretty acute sense of danger, I've noticed that I'm far more acutely aware of my surroundings than my friends who have regular jobs. I'm very acutely aware of who's around and what the possibilities are. It changes the way you see your surroundings. I don't seek out dangerous situations, I'm pretty much a chicken, and I don't want to endanger any of my colleagues, producers, or anyone like that. I think we're pretty conservative in any risk we might take. Truly, I don't believe we've taken any risks. I'm pretty careful about how I organize stories.

What about when you were younger and it was just you and a camera?
There's ton of stuff I look back onmy first three years I think, I can't believe I did that. For instance, the idea of going to Somalia alone, not having a place to stay or security. It was the first major breaking story I did. I literally had a fake press pass. There was fighting between different clans in the city. I literally landed on the air strip there and had no place to stay, had no idea about the town, and it ended up a truck load of gunmen approached me, and I ended up hiring them as my gunmen, and we ended up going around and going to the burial grounds where all these bodies are being dumped, and there were all these empty pits, and I was thinking, they could just shoot me and put me in a pit and no one would ever know. I gave them all my money, but they could want my backpack. I had journalist friends coming the next day and we needed translation and security and a car, and it was just ridiculous, absurd stuff. I look back on that now and the situation in Somalia is worse now bc you do have armed Islamic fundy groups the level of kidnapping in the early 90s is nothing like what it is now.When the US got involved in Somali, There was a caravan of reporters drove by and asked me who I worked for, and I said I worked for this educational TV show, and the guy said, you're fucking risking your life for educational TV? It never really occurred to me, frankly. It was interesting and important and I wanted to see what was happening and I wanted to be a workhorse, so I figured I'd start covering wars.I got arrested in Iran in '93 or '94, and was held for three days, and once you're under arrest in a place with no embassy, you suddenly realize how alone you really are. I hadn't really done anything wrong, I just kind of made a mistake, but nevertheless, that was pretty eye opening.I flew into Sergievo during the first year of the war when the airport was still open, later I had to drive in, and finally, after a year, the company I'd been working for gave me a bulletproof vest. And it was like, the lowest level of protection you could buy in a bulletproof vest. It was for pistol fire only, and didn't do anything for rifle fire. I read the warning label as I was landing, and it said, warning: this vest does not protest against sharp projectiles” and I remember thinking I was an idiot feeling pleased about this bulletproof vest and I realized it was completely useless. I didn't have an armored vehicle.

Do you think you we are naïve?
I don't think I was naïve, I just didn't allow fear to stop me from going to a place. I don't believe you should be ruled by fear in anything in your life. I don't like anything that scares me, and I prefer to face it dead on and get over it. Whether it's public speaking I wasn't fond of it a couple of years ago and I just forced myself to do it and now I'm fine with it. Anyone who says they're not scared is a fool, or a liar, or both. I don't want that fear in my stomach to be part of my life, so I work to eliminate it.

With some of the athletes we talk to, it's almost as if they seek out fear because of that feeling of empowerment they achieve after getting through it.
I think it's a little different. For example, I would not bungee jump. I have no interest in jumping out of an airplane, or any of the things people do for thrills to push their limits and all that. To me, that seems foolish, and there's no point. If people are suffering in a place, the question isn't, why should you go? It's, why wouldn't I go? Why shouldn't I be there? I assume that everyone would want to be in Haiti if they could, to be doing whatever they could, and I don't have any skill other than putting stuff together for television. That's what I bring to the table, and I'm not saying there's much skill in that. I'm aware it's a potentially dangerous situation, but it's not part of the appeal, and it's certainly not something I would do unless there was a reason behind it.

But you must have friends who view what you do as crazy.
Yeah, but, anyone who knows me and sees the work I'm trying to do, they get it. My mom gets it, my friends get it. Part of them may not want me to go

Does that frustrate you?
It doesn't frustrate me. Everyone has things they like and don't like. To me, its not a question of whether I'm going to go or not, it's a question of how fast can I get there, how quick can we make it happen, can we broadcast from there, can we get a satellite, can we actually do the kind of stuff we want to do? Some friends get surprised, but anyone who knows me knows… I feel very lucky to be in the situation I'm in now. For a long time I worked without a vehicle and now I work with this organization that wants to go wherever I'm interested in going and can help make it happen. There's nothing better than being in a place and actually having the resources and capabilities to get in and start doing what you're supposed to be doing.

I'm curious about the logistics. Describe what you were doing when you first got word of the quake and Haiti?
I was in the office. I get in around noon and spend the day prepping for stuff and doing research and writing, and the quake happened, and right away we knew this had potential, so we started looking into flights. I'd been to Haiti once, so I knew there was a jet blue flight that would leave really late to the Dominican Republic, but I knew if it was really bad they'd shut the airport, so I instantly booked the 1 am flight out of New York to Santa Domingo so I left my show an hour early, someone filled in, and we got on the flight with minutes to spare. We got in at 5 AM, drove an hour to a small airport, and tried to find some way to get in. If you have to drive from DR to Port au Prince, it's like a 7 hour drive. I thought there would be a lot of flights and relief work there already, but literally it was my team and another from CNN and one team from the Int'l Red Cross.We were the second chopper into PaP. I was the first reporter, I think. I'm not sure. I basically communicated with a government official who was taking off in some company helicopter to go assess the needs in PaP to see what the DR could do, and they had an extra seat, and he invited me in, and we touched down. And my team was able to get flown in too. But we were prepared to drive, we didn't want to get in the way of any relief efforts, but we thought there would be lots of equipment and maybe they'll take all the flights, but an empty plane agreed to take my team over.We got in at 10 am on Wednesday. We got loaned a truck for awhile from a construction co. we drove out of the airport and we had satellite phone. I was sick for the first 24 hours, I was projectile vomiting for awhile. Anywhere you went it was just unbelievable. We found this girl who was stuck and we stayed there for a half hour while they rescued her and we told her story and we needed to find a place that was safe for everybody. We needed a secure environment where we had access to electricity or where we could use our own generators. We found a motel and worked with the people who ran it.

With tragedies on the scale of Katrina or the tsunami or Haiti, where do you start?
You just turn the camera on and open your eyes. You cover where you point the camera. It is literally all around you. No matter what direction you move in, you turn on the camera and keep the camera rolling. It's all happening in real time and goes on for days like that. You're editing and packaging, and you try to get a little sleep if you can, but the next morning you go out and think, ok I'm going to look for a rescue, or I'm going to go to a cemetery, but invariably, you never get there bc so much happens that just comes across your path, you see someone carrying the corpse of their child and they want to talk to you and you end up following them/

Do you sleep?
The first couple of days, you really don't. you try to get a little here and there. But because of CNN international, which bc of time zones, you're constantly going. On a story like this, there are days where we shot three of four stories in a day, and sometimes it's a question of, can we edit all those stories on the laptop and air time? You shoot all day with daylight, spend nighttime editing and writing, and for a couple days, you don't sleep much. But frankly, you don't even think about that stuff because it's so overwhelming.

There has been criticism of your team because of the way some of you helped people out during your reporting. At one point you helped pull a boy out of a looting mob after he'd been hit in the head. The critics say that a journalist's role is to not get involved in a story. What's your reaction to that?
I don't think that you can be I think technology allows us to be in places now that other people have not been able to go in generations past. To be places before relief workers are, before large scale involvement has arrived. That presents some very unique challenges. You suddenly find yourself in a situation where, in the case of say, a doctor, what do you do? There are some journalism purists who say that you do nothing, that you just go watch and to report and serve, and I certainly understand that and I have done that most of my career. I do think occasionally that the sit presents itself where you can do something very easily that can make a huge difference in someone's life, and I don't have a problem with that. There's rarely a case where I intervene, but in the case of a little boy who got hit in the head with a cement block, no one was helping him, he couldn't get up, he'd try to get up and collapse, blood was pouring from his head it was a split second decision to take him out of a situation where cement blocks are being thrown around where he'd get hit again and killed. To me it didn't seem like I think anyone would have done the same thing if they had the opportunity. There was one sit where someone had been rescued from the rubble and no vehicle to get her to the hospital. They used Chris's vehicle (CNN team) to transport her. Do you say, I'm a purist and I'm not going to let them use my vehicle? To me, the answer is you do whatever you do based on what you feel your gut feeling tells you is appropriate. I think there is a line and I think it's important not to cross that line, but I've been in these situations now for 20 years, and it's a case by case basis, but when you get in the field, you know what's appropriate and know what's not. C: looking back, any situations where you wish you'd acted?

What's your sense of how this story is going to play out in the news cycle? What's your role in keeping it on people's minds?
It's already dropped off. People are bored with it, it seems. I was surprised, quite frankly, how it captured people's attention. It's one of the difficult things when you're reporting, in terms of, you can feel the story start to slip away from you. You can feel viewers starting to move on to other things. That's a hard thing. Everyone there is aware of the need for international attention. I'll be going back repeatedly. I'm not worried about CNN's commitment to it. I went back to the Gulf Coast after Katrina 20 or so times. I worry about how much people will continue to pay attention to it.

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Sailing from Haiti to Miami

sperkins-pom — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

EARLY ON THE MORNING of the Ides of March, we rolled the boat down the beach on its own oars. It bobbed gently on the Caribbean for the first time, all of 21 feet long. That’s slightly shorter than a full-size F-350 pickup. When Geert van der Kolk, the scrawny Dutch-born skipper, hoisted himself over the starboard rail, the boat nearly swamped right there.

Sipriz voyage

Haitian immigrants

Geert van der Kolk and crew

Geert van der Kolk and crew members Jean Oblit Laguerre and Gracien Alexandre tie up the Sipriz near Miami

Sipriz

The Sipriz under sail

A handful of Haitians waded in with us, pushing and heaving, scoffing and teasing. We were famous in this village: the little crew of sixthree Haitians and three blancs, as they call whiteswho would sail an equally tiny boat to America.

Villagers presented us with giftscashews, a fishing lurebut mostly they laughed.

“Ti bato!” a Haitian woman told us, cracking herself and her friend up. “Ti bato. Sis person!” In Haitian Creole, a derivative of French, that’s short for petit bateau. Small boat, six people.

“Sis person!” she said, wailing with pleasure.

The boat was christened the Sipriz, Creole for “Surprise,” with a bottle of apple cider wielded by Mary Houghton, a lifelong sailor and childhood friend of mine who would do much of the tiller work ahead of us. The “sparkling” juice proved flat, but Mary sprayed down the boat and the crowd as best she could.

In a test, the Sipriz zipped fleetly around the little anchorage at Kay Kakok, one of the last places in the Caribbean where men build wooden workboats with their bare hands, the way it’s been done for centuries. The village sits on an island of 12,000 people, Île-à-Vache, six miles off the southern coast of Haiti, an obscurity off an obscurity. It has no electricity or running water, no sewers or hospitals, no jobs and few shoes, zero roads, and a single moped. But there are turquoise Caribbean currents, waving turtle grass, boys playing soccer, donkeys and horses for transport, hardworking fishermen, lots of alcohol, a hilarious transgendered American artist, and endless groves of palm trees. These shed coconuts, the only cool drink on the island.

—————————————-@#95;box photo=image_2 alt=image_2_alt@#95;box

Rough Crossing
The voyage of the Sipriz, March 15April 20, 2009

1. START: March 15, 7 A.M.

2. HEART FAILURE? March 20, 8 A.M.

3. COAST GUARD HELICOPTER ENCOUNTER: March 21, 9:45 A.M.

4. COAST GUARD CUTTER ENCOUNTER: March 22, 7 P.M.

5. ZIGZAGGING STRUGGLE BACK TO THE ISLAND: March 23, approx. 9 A.M.

———————————————

Immediately, the rudder on our brand-new boat jammed. Jean Oblit Laguerre, the wiry Haitian carpenter, his hands covered in scars, waded out from the beach where he’d built the Sipriz. He hacked at the rudder with a machete until it swung freely.

Oblit had an incentive to make it work, since he himself was coming on the trip. But even steering true, the Sipriz still suffered more shortages than a Cuban bakery. To start with, it had no keelonly a nominal keel boardand no ballast. This was so the boat could be beached easily, but in a storm it could flip like a leaf. The Sipriz had no lights, no radar, no depth finder, no electronics but the ones we fit in our pockets. Geert’s tattered, ten-year-old chart book was “ready for retirement,” he admitted, but no matter: The last reliable soundings for most of Haiti’s coast had been made by the U.S. military in 1904. The Sipriz had no bunks, seats, or creature comforts. No cabin but the cockpit, open to the sea and sun. No head. No spare sails. The hull design was primitive and totally inadequate for an 800-mile journey. Ti bato, indeed.

For lunch, we ate an elaborate French-Creole meal, aristocrats before the guillotine. Laconic by nature, preoccupied by equipment and logistics, Geert skipped the soaring speeches and poured shots of Barbancourt rum to toast our luck.

“With God’s help,” said Gracien Alexandre, the Haitian first mate.

“With God and GPS,” Geert countered.

Geert was a pretty unlikely captain for a Haitian ship: a 55-year-old Dutch-born novelist who lived in Washington, D.C., and sailed, like Mary and me, on the Chesapeake Bay. Ten years before, crossing the Gulf Stream, he’d tried to help rescue a sinking boat filled with Haitians. Forty drowned, an incident he recounted in The Smuggler of the Exumas, one of his ten novels. Geert had become obsessed with the Haitians’ ingenuity and daring. His planto build a Haitian boat, the Haitian way, and sail it 800 miles on the route Haitians use to flee to Americalooked like suicide to me, but he called it “a sporting challenge with a purpose.”

Several purposes, really. Geert hoped the journey would humanize the faceless Haitian boat people, to make their plight plainthough he had limited expectations. (“This isn’t Save the Whales for people,” he told me one day before the trip.) He also wanted to write a novel about the journey. Mary, 50, a lifelong sailor whose children had left for college, wanted to get back to the sea. As for me, I’d seen too many refugees. At Cuba’s easternmost tip, not far from here, I’d met a 15-year-old boy preparing to sail for America in a canoe. How could I say no to what a boy would do?

So that was the plan: America or bust. We would pick our way around the Haitian coastline and then launch ourselves over the Windward Passage, an 80-mile crossing to Great Inagua, the southernmost island in the Bahamas. That was about 240 miles, at least a week in an open boat, combining intimate exposure to Haiti’s perils with a deep-water crossing of a busy shipping lane. Mary and I planned to quit in the Bahamas; Geert and the Haitians would sail on, joined near the end by Geert’s wife, Olga, and a videographer. The Bahamas would be the longest stretch of the trip, but the sailing would be easier, with beach landings, good wind direction, and several hundred miles sheltered from Atlantic rollers. After a month, Geert hoped to cross the Gulf Stream from Bimini to Palm Beach. A cargo ship could make the entire journey in four days.

We made a sailor’s exit the next morning, up at 5 A.M. to stuff drybags by the flicker of an oil lamp. Then we waded to the boat in the shadowy half light. By seven we had slipped out of the harbor and put our backs to a sunrise obscured by thick clouds.

A strong easterly filled the sail, a Haitian rig like a gunter, the bamboo peak held up by a rope sling. The sail was painted brightly with the Sankofa, a mythological bird that carried news of the slaves back to Africa. Two hours later, racing westward, I threw up six or seven times. After that, only land made me feel sick.

Like hundreds of thousands of Haitians before us, we had slipped the shackles of this cursed land. We were outbound, with a strong following breeze, our optimism unbound by reality.

PER-CAPITA INCOME in Haiti is less than $400 a year, life expectancy is about 53, and just about everyone who can get out of the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere tries to do so. The richest nation in the Western Hemisphere is 560 miles north as the crow flies, and thousands flee toward America in ramshackle boats even in calm years. Although some reach the U.S., blending into the roughly one million Haitians thriving, legally or illegally, in Miami and Queens, the majority are intercepted at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard. That number fluctuates with Haiti’s frequent politico-economic meltdowns: In 1992, after a coup deposed the country’s first democratically elected president, the erratic preacher-populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Coast Guard stopped 31,438 Haitian migrants, and another 25,069 in 1994. Ten years later, in 2004, there was a smaller surge, with 3,229 Haitians picked up after Aristide, who’d returned to power, was ousted a second time (likely with help from the Bush administration). Then things settled down. The year 2008 showed a slight decline from the year before1,582 migrants sent back home. But then Haiti was hit by four tropical storms, killing some 800 people and wiping out crops and roads. When the hurricane season ended, in November, a tide of desperate migrants surged out. By July of 2009, the Coast Guard had already plucked 1,491 Haitians from the Caribbean.

French plantation owners started the Haitian nightmare. When the slaves finally rose up, in 1791, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, they annihilated their blanc masters and ripped the white out of the French tricolor. But the world’s first slave republic inherited only negatives. An elite of mulattoes and former slaves ruled the black state with greed and impunity; in the last century, father-and-son villains Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier used torture and fear to reign from 1957 to 1986.

In some ways, the country has since gone from bad to worse. The judicial system is corrupt, the politics a charade, the economy nonexistent. In the past 20 years, Haiti’s population has soared from six million to nine million; with more than 300 people per square mile, it’s the densest nation in the Caribbean. Another 900,000 young people enter the job market every five years, but there is no work. A 1994 UN embargo mainly succeeded in wiping out sweatshop jobs, and they don’t even make our baseballs anymore. Trees are cut for charcoal, washing away half of Haiti’s topsoil and rendering a once lush green island into shades of sulfur. With poor land and awful roads, rice grown in Haiti ends up costing twice as much as the American rice sold on the black market.

After the 2004 coup that toppled Aristide, chaos, looting, and gang violence ruled Haiti, until the UN deployed 9,000 blue-helmet troops that cleared the slums and markets in violent shootouts. The UN stage-managed a new government under prime minister Michèle Pierre-Louis and poured $2.5 billion into peacekeeping to stop the cascade of failures. The rarest thing in Haitigood newsbegan to trickle in. When I arrived in March, UN troops with armored vehicles still controlled the intersections in Port-au-Prince. Kidnapping was down. Bill Clinton was hip-hopping through schools with Wyclef Jean, the Haitian-born member of the Fugees. Hillary soon followed, bringing $300 million in aid and a ten-year commitment to duty-free access to the U.S. market for Haitian textiles. The minimum wage was raised to $1.75 a day.

By the standards of Haiti, we had arrived at a moment of progress. As one Port-au-Prince resident told me, quite seriously, “In terms of the shooting, it’s much better.”

ÎLE-À-VACHE HAD DROPPED BEHIND US by the middle of that first afternoon. The ocean changed from coastal azure to deep-sea blue, and we felt out the routines of sailing, everyone finding his job. Geert pored over his charts, plotting with a compass, ruler, and GPS. Mary steered, holding the mainsheet with a loop around a knee or foot, the way the Haitian crew did it. I sat in the bilge, the “human sandbag,” in Geert’s phrase, ballasting the boat and watching the narrow band of horizon between sail and deck with binoculars.

The Haitian crew were sailors from Île-à-Vache; they’d spent their lives in these coastal waters, navigating by eye and ear, wind direction and dead reckoning, by the stars and the waves. Gracien, the first mate, was tall, powerfully built, unusually quiet for a Haitian, and had been at sea since the age of five. Now 40, he was a Methodist assistant pastor on land and a true expert at sea. (“He’s really in charge of the boat,” Geert admitted.) Oblit, the shipwright, was 50; he would spend hours on the upwind rail, balanced barefoot, watching over his creation. Lastly there was Manis, or Jean Emmaniste Samedy, 39, a voluble, narrow-shouldered Pentecostal who spoke in tongues. His hands were crabbed by a degenerative disease that he attributed to divine punishment.

To them, America was a mysterious idea, somewhere north, beyond the Bahamas. Geert had raised funds from friends to cover their expenses. He’d also paid $250 to each of their families, with another $750, to ensure that no one tried to stay on in Miami, coming by the time they returned to Île-à-Vache. This tiny sum loomed large in their calculations, a financial windfall for men who, between them, had seven years of education. Mani and Obit didn’t use a compass; they ignored the small box of numbers we carried around, the GPS, as beyond the possible.

We bounded over waves that day, the Sipriz at her best, running downwind at six and even seven knots. Oblit had built her like every other boat on Île-à-Vache, cutting trees, sawing the wood by handmostly danmari, with cashew on the transomsplitting a curved branch to make symmetrical ribs and sealing the gaps with old rags and homemade resin. He used only five toolsa saw, hand drill, machete, adze, and hammer.

The only metal was in the anchor, the rudder hinges, and the nails. Screws are stronger in a storm but cost slightly more; in what he later termed an “excess of authenticity,” Geert followed Haitian custom and refused to fund the difference. In the end he paid Oblit $1,200 to build itincluding materials. The boat had no tackle, hardware, pulleys, winches, or cleats. More important, it had no engine. Without a motor we were helpless when becalmed, reliant on two long oars for maneuvering out of the crushing paths of supertankers and cruise ships, which would not see us at night.

I’d stuffed the drybags before dawn and knew what was in the tiny fore and aft holds. A lot of crackers (the Haitian hardtack), five pounds of rice, five of beans, a bottle of ketchup, two coconuts, some bouillon cubes, a broken Swiss Army knife, 18 eggs, five water jugs holding five gallons each (and, we discovered too late, leaking), a bundle of kindling for cooking on the beach, ten bags of spaghetti, a gallon of vegetable oil, nuts, dried fruit, and granola bars. Most precious were a loaf of fresh bread and a genuine Dutch Gouda, sealed in wax. We also carried an emergency beacon, flares, two GPS units, two cell phones, and a pair of VHF radios, the latter with a roughly seven-mile range. Tucked under a thwart was an aged life raft. Only after the trip would Geert point out that it held four people, not six.

Hispaniola, the island Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic, is shaped like a lobster, and our course required rounding its southwestern claw, with three different capes, to make the old port of Jérémie. It had been Geert’s intention to avoid sailing at night; we’d beach the boat, cook and sleep on land, and continue with daylight. But the shore was mostly surf on rock, a line of steep hills tumbling into the sea. This seemed OK; the wind was strong, and Gracien and Oblit claimed we would reach Jérémie by midnight. Manis added that the villages on this coast were too dangerous to stop in anyway, full of thieves.

But wind is fickle. Our breeze dropped at dusk as we approached Cap Tiburon, the first of three points we now had to round in the dark. A squall pushed us everywhere but forward, and midnight came and went, the crew cold and wet. The darkness of the coast was terrifying: no electrified houses, no headlights, not even the glow of a distant television or the flicker of a kerosene lamp. At 3 A.M. the flank of a mountain caught fire, an orange blaze that grew, rose, and finally took shape as the moon, pale red from Haiti’s charcoal-smudged skies. I had the tiller and was steering by the North Star, but moon and stars both vanished in another downpour. Phosphorescent microbes winked in the eddies. Then another moon rose, this one in the impossible west: a ship sliding up the channel over on the Cuban side, 40 miles away.

“We have left Île-à-Vache,” Gracien suddenly cried. “It is gone!” Only 20 hours and we had crossed into what the Haitians called “l’etranger,” the world beyond.

At dawn, without a breath of wind, we rowed for the first time. I had expected to row in emergencies, but the Haitians were hardened and impatient. The oars were 13-foot-long sweeps, requiring two people each, and rested in “oarlocks” that were just sharpened sticks jammed into the gunwales. Four people, rowing hard, could move the Sipriz at one knot. The morning passed this way, under a burning sun. “The last 24 hours,” Geert noted grimly, “are a perfect lesson in exposure.”

Finally Gracien blew on a lambi, or conch shell, a plaintive, low howl that is a traditional Haitian way to summon the wind. As a Christian, he didn’t believe that “white magic” could work. (Black magic is another matter.) But he blew the horn anyway.

And the wind picked up. Like heroes, we raced into the Jérémie harbor with white foam under our bow.

“Get dressed,” Gracien said, in Creole. Each of the Haitians drew out a plastic bag holding a pair of slacks and proper shoes. The poor must not look poor.

Thirty-five hours, 83 miles, a few blisters, some vomit. The shakedown cruise was over.

JÉRÉMIE WAS a busy port once, exporting coffee and timber, and has some grand houses in faded pastels. But the town, a center of opposition to the Duvalier dynasty, had been deliberately strangled into a stupor. The tired shops, behind high warehouse doors, still carried more dust than merchandise. Everything smelled of trash and jasmine. The waterfront was furiously busy while the big Port-au-Prince ferry was docked (cacao and coffee beans drying in the sun, scores of vendors and hundreds of gawkers, cargoes of cement and charcoal and mangoes being loaded or offloaded, a woman chasing a man with a knife) and then deserted after the ferry left.

But there was a hotel, with hot food and ice for the rum. Manis, Oblit, and Gracien took cold showers in my bathroom, unaware that there was a hot-water tap.

We struck out in the morning for our first open-water crossing, straight north over the Golfe de la Gonâve, from the southern claw to the northern pincer. With the wind pleasantly abeam, we had knocked off tens of miles by midafternoon. Then it abruptly died again. The Sipriz floated under a hot sun, and we dove into a spotlessly blue sea, like swimming through a sapphire. Then we rowed.

During a break I noticed Gracien and Oblit staring at the horizon. “Vent,” the first mate announced. Wind. After half an hour it arrived, puffing out the mainsail, and we bubbled north, ripping the loaf of bread and the Gouda with waterlogged fingernails. Gracien had been trolling all along and now hooked a huge dorado, which he reeled in by hand and strangled. He gutted the fish with the bread knife and rubbed it all over with coarse salt brought for just this purpose.

As if we needed salt. Waves came into the boat constantly, and we were wet day and night. Eventually I learned to sail like the Haitians, barefoot, in underwear and a foul-weather jacket. The odor of the sea was supplemented by the briny stink of the dorado, drying like cheap bacalao. Fish blood sloshed in the bilge, adding a high note of chloroform, along with swollen chips of oatmeal and granola and distended raisins like fruit corpses. Breadcrumbs added a gummy film. The most nauseating was the odor of tinned mackerel in tomato sauce, which the rest of the crew devoured with their fingers in a desperate moment as I stood back in horror. There was also a small bonito rotting somewhere under the tarps, although we couldn’t find it, and later in the trip, when weather made reaching the rail impossible, the faint ammonia of urine. Haiti added its own olfactory signature: Even far offshore we could smell the acrid trace of charcoal fires.

Haitian refugees might have considered this a luxury cruise. Though they use bigger boats than ours60-foot charcoal carriers or purpose-built people smugglers of twice our length and four or five times our displacementthe passengers are typically packed into holds, with little water and a spoonful of corn mush once a dayconditions I can compare only to those of a slave ship. They would have no fresh air, no tarps, no waterproof gear, no GPS or life preservers. But they go much shorter distances, leaving from the northernmost tip of Haiti, not the southernmost, like us. And while some Haitian skippers go straight to Florida, many quit in the Bahamas, leaving their passengers to finish the trip later, with professional smugglers in speedboats.

We sailed far into another cold, wet, grumpy night, looking for a town called Môle Saint-Nicolas. The GPS went wiggy, so we followed the North Star, closing on another blackened coast. In a mortal sin of navigation, the Cap du Môle lighthouse was dark.

Around midnight, the clouds closed in. Manis and Oblit roused me from sleepnot hard, since I had boat ribs, flashlights, and canned food jabbing me at all points. “M’sur Pa‘, ” they said, prodding me awake.

“Fait le kompa’,” they urged. “Fait le kompa’.” Make the compass. I fixed a course and lay down on a can opener again.

Around 2:30 A.M., we gave up on finding the town and pulled hard for shore. But the anchor ropea crazy concoction of sheets and webbing improvised every nightwas too short to find the bottom. (“Jamais!” the despairing Oblit cried out. Never!) Finally, pressed dangerously close to cliffs roaring with surf, we anchored.

Gracien ordered us not to speak English or use flashlights. This coast was filled with gens méchants“naughty people” in French, but with a much darker meaning in Creole. Half the drug dealers in the Caribbean had to pass along this coast; the people here, Gracien said, specialized in robbing boats and killing witnesses. Foreigners would attract attention; he tried to make us hide under tarps. But too late: We saw a burning torch come along the hillside, the unseen figure stopping to watch us. “Pirates,” Gracien said.

I had a heart attack, I think. As soon as Gracien pronounced the word pirates, the stress, fear, and exhaustion of the previous days broke through me. The left side of my chest began to close in, tighter and tighter. In a minute I was having trouble breathing. I clutched my chest, wheezed, and lay down on the foredeck while I still could. For ten minutes the pain grew until, twitching on the deck, I almost blacked out. Trying to keep silent, Mary gave me two aspirin, which I ground in my clenched teeth. Another ten minutes and the pain subsided, slowly. Whatever had happened, I sat up after an hour, frightened but fine.

In any case, we were 20 to 40 hours from even a bad hospital. Showered by a chill rain, we stretched out where we could. Manis and I shared the puny foredeck, which pitched enough to toss a careless sleeper into the sea. Manis rolled himself up in the jib; I tied myself to the mast like Odysseus.

Around 3 A.M., a dugout canoe slipped out from shore. “Ou se le bato bleu?” a man called. Are you the blue boat? “Non,” Gracien replied, tensely. The man paddled away.

It happened again, twice more during the night. Each time it was a different man in a different canoe. Are you the blue boat? they called softly. “Le bato bleu?” Each time, Gracien sent them away.

In fact, the Sipriz had a blue hull, but we were not the drug dealers they were waiting for. We survived because we were too small to be important, a bug on Haiti’s troubled skin. There was nothing to steal on such a tiny craft, no secrets worth having. In any hard storm, Robinson Crusoe noted, “the light ships fared the best.”

At 5:30 I felt the foredeck yawing under me; we were sailing north in darkness.

WE MADE OUR LAST LANDFALL in Haiti at Môle Saint-Nicolas. In the first half light, I heard Geert whispering in French and Gracien crying. “I’m not tired,” Gracien was saying. “My only problem is Yadle.” That was the 15-year-old daughter he’d left back home. “I’m not tired,” he repeated, although he was handling the boat 15 hours a day, wrestling the sails without mechanical aid, carrying our lives on his shoulders.

The town was amazingly hard to find. Boys in fishing canoes pursued us over the sea at dawn with howls of delightSuch a fine boat! Such good sails!but acted stumped by our questions, as if they’d never heard of the region’s only major port. In late afternoon, I saw a gleam in the palm treesa tin roof. Gracien urged us to pass by without stopping; the people here were gens méchants. But this was our fifth day at sea40 hours on this leg aloneand we needed to refit for the Windward Passage. Geert ordered a turn into the bay.

We came into a soft beach rimmed with old French forts, and Geert jumped down, expecting knee-deep water. The clarity fooled him, and he sank up to his stomach. Amusing but for the fact that he had our two cell phones in his pants. The only weather reports we got came over these phones, in the form of text messages from a Maryland sailor watching over us. We frantically shook off the phones, trying to dry them. But Gracien had another idea: He began to “wash” the phones with fresh waterprompting my breakthrough moment after a lifetime battling the French language. “��ê�ٱ�!” I shouted. “Ce n’est pas une bonne idée de laver les telephones avec eau! Defense d’eau!!!“

Too late. Both phones fizzled out. No more weather reports.

For a bunch of gens méchants, the citizens of Môle Saint-Nicolas were first-rate. Behind a veil of trees, we found a squarely laid-out town with friendly people and busy commerce. The beetling waterfront would have made Patrick O’Brian weep: tattered sailing vessels of every size, from huge charcoal carriers to tiny lateen-rigged dugouts. Everywhere, great crews of lean men unloaded lighters of goods, and barefoot boys manned the rigging of a double-masted cargo sloop that looked as old as the Napoleonic forts guarding it.

The last weather report had mentioned a cold front, with accompanying southwestern winds. Perfect for us: A south wind would carry us straight to the Bahamas, making a lark of the 80-mile Windward Passage. But talk of leaving at midnight evaporated as we found a spot on shore and began to drink cold Prestige beer and stew the salted dorado over an open fire. The malodorous fish proved spectacular with beans and rice.

But the next morning, when we reached open sea, we were pushed only by the traditional easterliesblowing in from the Atlantic unimpeded and raising great swells, so relentless they gave the Windward Passage its name. We had 80 miles to go.

“This is a very lonely piece of ocean,” Geert said, steering north on the tack we would hold for the next 30 hours. Somewhere ahead was the Bahamas.

NOT EVERYTHING SMALL goes unnoticed. The Sipriz was barely three miles off the coast of Haiti, still inside her territorial waters, when the U.S. Coast Guard busted usand quick.

In my sandbag duties, I was watching the western horizon with binoculars when I spotted a small dot ten miles out. What I first took for a ship, and then an airplane, turned quickly into a helicopter heading precisely for us. It was an HH-60 Jayhawk, the Coast Guard’s version of the Blackhawk, with an orange body, a white slash across the tail, and a black nosecone full of radar and thermal sensors. No hiding from the Coasties today.

It wasn’t a bad feeling, watching the Jayhawk sweep slowly around us once, the orange-helmeted air crew gawking from the open door. Unable to raise them on our toy radios, we just waved. Apparently satisfied that we weren’t refugees, they peeled off and returned back to the west.

And if we had been? The Coast Guard stops scores every year, sometimes hundreds. All are desperately overloaded200 people on a big charcoal carrier or 80 in a 35-foot sloop. One Coast Guard commander referred to the boats as “the world’s most pathetic oceangoing vessels.” The dehydrated, weakened passengers are removed to a cutter in an operation always described as a “rescue.” It is a rescuethis July, for example, the Coast Guard plucked 113 Haitians off a reef in Turks and Caicosbut this is also the blunt application of our anti-immigration muscle.

Many Haitians naively welcome the appearance of the Coast Guard, believing they will be taken to America. Instead they receive food, water, flip-flops, toothbrushes, and an express trip back to Haiti. Since they’ve typically sold everything they ownfishing canoes, houses, farmlandto finance the failed voyage, a Haitian boat person may end up a month later as a beggar in his own village. It is the measure of Haiti’s despair that people keep trying anyway.

And then their boats are sunk. The Coast Guard usually machine-guns them. Again, there is a safety aspect: Abandoned boats are a hazard. But a boat full of holes will also never again carry desperate people to America.

On that first day we made good progress, due north, and then night came. We were 30 miles into the Windward Passage.

The night was bad. Water came in constantly. The wind grew hard, boisterous, and finally, at 4 A.M., began to gust at more than 20 knots. We crashed back and forth, unable to find equipment, a note of desperation in our howled communications. A clumsy move with my shoulder parted the shroud, dropping the jib. The boat could easily swamp this way, and if we went over in this strong wind, in a tangle of equipment and lines, amid hurtling waves, I doubted we would all come out. But Gracien scampered up the mast as if he were fetching a coconut and, bobbing back and forth, spliced the cheap plastic rope.

Now it was the Haitians who had their heart failures. Brave on their home sea, they were unmasted by l’etranger, the immense new world we had entered. Gracien stayed at his post but began to shout over the wind that we should turn around: “We must go to Cuba!” Oblit grew hypothermic and began to mumble in despair. Manis picked up the fear: “We are lost, we are lost,” he shouted in Creole. “We must go back!” He began to pray for us each by name, his voice rising into a sustained howl to JezikriJesus Christ. Geert finally told him to save his voice for the prayers we would need later and launched into a string of Dutch sea shanties.

It was a night for misery. I wrapped the shaking Oblit in my arms and we sat like that under a tarp, separated from the sea by the thin boards he had made himself.

EVERYONE KNOWS THE COLOR of the sky. It is blue by day, gray with clouds, diurnal yellow at the extremes of the day. It is even white at moments, the pure white of a Maine fog. But worst of all is black: the sum of all fears. Night, tied to an open boat, on a violent sea.

Well before dawn we saw a glow in the north, which we mistook for the Morton Salt works on Great Inagua. It was another bright cargo ship, racing upwind at more than 20 knots. We never once succeeded in raising these big ships on our radios; with no lights and a tiny radar signature, we had to quickly assess each one’s route and steer for safety.

But in the last moments of darkness we saw real hope, the lighthouse on Great Inagua. Weakly at first, it gave out double pulses, brushing the planets. The GPS showed we were still 35 miles out, but there was no mistaking it: That light was the Bahamas.

We spent our second day on the Windward Passage in false confidence, convinced we would make landfall by lunch, or midafternoon, or sunset. Although capsizing had been our greatest concern, the Sipriz had proved surprisingly stable. But the lack of a true keel cost us in another way. Big rollers, towering over the rail by seven feet or more, repeatedly picked the boat up and put it down two yards to the west. We experimented with the mainsail but could not hold our northern course; the closer north we got to Inagua, the farther west we were from it. Geert spent hours poring over his wet charts, struggling with his calipers, staring mutely at the GPS. The wind backed to the northeast, even worse for our purposes.

In the afternoon we missed the island by 15 miles. It seemed incredible, impossible. Inagua now lay due east. We would have to tack almost exactly upwind in a boat that could not even hold a course abeam.

At sunset, dodging a container ship and rushing to don our night gear, we failed to notice another ship slip in behind us: the Coast Guard again. A short-range cutter eased up to the Sipriz, crawling with a boarding team in orange. In failing light, we finally raised them on the radio and spent half an hour spelling out G-E-E-R-T-V-A-N-D-E-R-K-O-L-K. (They put down the boat name as Sea Breeze.) Our Haitians gave up, passive, letting the bow fall off, the tiller flop. They assumed the trip was over, no matter how much Geert insisted that “le Coast Guard n’est pas un service de taxi.“

Geert pleaded for permission to continue on to the Coast Guard’s own base, on Great Inagua. He knew that if they stopped us now, they would probably destroy the Sipriz rather than tow it in heavy seas. Ten years of Geert’s dream hung in the balance.

The orange-clad boarding party went back inside. “Will advise,” the radio sputtered, and the cutter turned and ran into the darkness, moving fast.

Geert picked up our heading. We clipped into our harnesses. That night was physically harder than the one beforewetter, less hopefuland yet we were too tired now to care. We had been so close, in sight of the southernmost point in the Bahamas after 80 miles of open water, and yet here was the same blackness, worse now, the boat tattered, the crew spent. And here again, 14 hours later, the same white beacon, beating the same tattoo against the sky. It no longer cheered.

The last ten miles eastward turned out to mean about 30 miles north and south, beating upwind in hard tacks of about 20 minutes each. Geert said little; the skipper should be stoic. His real fear had always been that in a hard battering one of Oblit’s boards would break or the too-authentic nails would pull out. The wind settled at more than 20 knots, and the swells came storming in. I bailed for an hour straight, then cussed at Manis for dropping the bucket, forgetting that his cramped fingers were useless in the best of times.

But that white light in the black sky stayed with us, and we with it. We beat upwind, making no progress, hour after hour, always ten miles west of Great Inagua. Then, just before midnight, we felt a drop in the wind and soon the waves seemed to temper. Gracien could hold the boat higher than anyone, and he broke the ten-mile barrier for the first time. Right and left, we clawed our way east, to nine miles. Gradually we gained the wind shadow of the island. The ocean swells declined. Eight miles. Seven. Six. Five.

At this late hour, almost in sight of safety, the tireless Gracien collapsed, Geert fell asleep sitting up, and Mary and Manis and Oblit all crawled under tarps. Here the human sandbag rose up to be useful for half an hour. I took the tiller, holding a long northeastern tack, feet braced on the rail, the mainsheet wrapped around my waist. This is the whole import of such journeys: to prove yourself useful, even once. To watch over five sleeping forms and deliver them into the shore of an island at 3 A.M.

Four miles. Three miles. To serve your measure, even once.

When I could smell diesel, I roused the crew and we feebly tacked into Matthew Town, the only settlement. The tiny harbor was blocked by surf, and we threw down an anchor and slept, rocked by chill winds, until long after dawn. Finally Gracien glided us into the wharf, where we were met by Bahamian customs and a scramble team of U.S. Coast Guardsmen.

The customs officers were not amused. We had visas and passports but no departure stamps for Haiti, and the boat had no documents at all. They would not clear the Sipriz for entry, and crew were part of the boat. As soon as the storm passed, they told Geert, we had to turn around and sail back to Haiti.

BUT IT WAS NICE in the Bahamas. White sand. Fried fish. Cold beer. A Bahamian woman in a cell-phone store giggled when Geert and I walked in.

“Coast Guard say your boat too small,” she explained.

Yet the Sipriz was hardly done. The Haitian ambassador in Washington called his Bahamian colleague, and the customs officers relented. The little boat sailed on. Even the Coast Guard grew fond of the Sipriz, donating wool blankets, plus foul-weather gear for the Haitians. Gracien, Oblit, and Manis had a tough time of it, repeatedly harassed and finally attacked by Bahamian vigilantes who took them for illegal immigrants.

After five weeks at sea, the Sipriz finally crossed the Gulf Stream from Bimini into Florida on Monday, April 20a fast, wet ride that concluded at 3 A.M., when they scooted into the old Coast Guard station on Peanut Island, near Palm Beach. The museum caretaker greeted them with a bottle of soda. And Geert did get some attention in the end: The Miami Herald dedicated much of its front page to the arrival of the 21-foot surprise. The brave little ship was put on display in Palm Beach and, later, in Washington, D.C. The crew briefly starred on Creole radio stations; when their visas expired, all three went home to Île-à-Vache. I last saw the Sipriz sitting outside a museum in D.C., the wood faded and battered but the sail still bright with the messenger bird, the Sankofa.

Consider again the fate of all those other boatmen who have traveled that long sea road. For the Sipriz was not alone that last day, crossing over the Gulf Stream. Another small sailboat had come out of Haiti about the same time, following about the same course. They also suffered on the sea and were tested. They also threaded their way through the reefs and vigilantes of the Bahamas, and, with a mixture of good luck and bad weather to hide their passage, they evaded the Coast Guard. They too made the crossing into South Florida, on the same day. But their boat ran aground near Key Biscayne, where the Coast Guard found it. There were 73 people on board.

The 73 were discovered on a Sunday. By Wednesday afternoon every one of them was back in Haiti.

It’s hard to sink a little boat like that, made entirely of wood. The Coast Guard likely burned it.

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