An anxious journey to Haiti
Channel 4 News producer Hannah Storms blogs from her flight to Dominican Republic en route to Haiti to report on the earthquake.
Jean works for Continental Airlines but today he’s travelling with his employers for a different reason. For him and many others, Flight 743 is a flight of hope and uncertainty, blogs Channel 4 News producer Hannah Storm.
He’s flown from New York to Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic to try and cross into neighbouring Haiti and find his sister and son. He hasn’t heard from them since Tuesday’s earthquake struck. All he knows is his house in Tabard, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, has been destroyed.
Next to him sits Mitch, an anxious young man, who asks me several times in the few minutes we speak, if I am heading to Port-au-Prince today. “I need to get to the area of Carrefour,” he says. “I need to find my brother.”
Neither he nor Jean, nor many others on our flight — including me and my cameraman colleague Graham, have any real idea of how or when exactly we are going to get to Haiti. Some hope to fly in, but there is still no word if the airport really is open. Others hope to make the journey by road, some 6-8 hours in good weather, but many tell me of their concerns at the lack of recent reports about the state of the roads and speculate about the security conditions en route.
Felipe Castillo is returning to his native Dominican Republic from New Jersey. And from there, he too hopes to get to Haiti to find friends who are missing.
Clutching a print out of an internet photograph of the remains of the luxurious Hotel Montana, he tells me three members of his United Methodist Church mission he belongs to who were staying in the Montana and last heard of in the minutes before the earthquake. He says he has heard two of them are alive, but he is worried about the other.
Having spent some time living in the Hotel Montana, I feel particularly sad when I see my former home in rubble and wonder about the fate of those I knew working there.
Like Felipe, many of those on the plane are linked to church groups – indeed much of the aid and support Haiti has received in recent years has been through foreign missions in what is a largely a deeply devout country.
Reverend Ron Christian – his real name, he assures me as he chuckles – has spent many years flying around the world to help organise mission after natural and manmade disasters.
He says he’s expecting to fly in to Haiti with a high-level delegation, organised by a Congressman who apparently has the ear of the US Secretary of State and then there are the Norwegians, a small team who we notice as we board the plane, wearing black jackets with Nowegian Red Cross on the back.
One of the surgeons tells me how they are waiting to hear if their field hospital has arrived in Port-au-Prince on a Russian plane from Oslo.
The team consists of at least two surgeons, an anaesthetist and a midwife for a hospital which will have the capacity for 200 patients at a time. Bryn Ystgaard says he and his colleagues are the rapid response team and the first to deploy, but three days after the earthquake they too are still unsure how or when they will make it into Haiti.
As we land on the tarmac at Santo Domingo airport, the tourist planes are parked up alongside cargo planes and a handful of grey military-looking aircraft, from which people look to be unloading aid, perhaps hoping like many of us in the plane that somehow we’ll soon be in Haiti.
