Written on
February 16th, 2010
Just six weeks before an earthquake devastated Haiti, retired foreign service worker Lewis Lucke ’77 returned to the country where he once served as mission director of the U.S. Agency for International Development. He remembers those weeks before the quake as being filled with optimism. “It was the most hopeful period I had experienced in Haiti,” he said, ”with new investment, shops and stores opening, streets repaired and people upbeat.” Now Lucke is back in Haiti, working 16-hour days to ease shortages of medical care and shelter for earthquake victims. Read the full story in the American-Statesman, a newspaper based in Austin, Texas.
Written on
February 15th, 2010
Three campus clubs worked together with support from Thunderbird Student Government to organize a Haitian fundraiser Feb. 11, 2010, at the Pub.
Overall, students raised more than $650 for Education Across Borders, a nonprofit organization that helps Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic stay in school and overcome the effects of poverty. Thunderbird Professor Mary Sully de Luque, Ph.D., serves on the organization’s Board of Directors.
“We’re Thunderbirds,” said Net Impact President Nicole Kukowski ’10. “We care about the world outside Glendale, Arizona.”
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Written on
February 15th, 2010
Thunderbird graduate William Devir ’74 arrived in Haiti shortly after the Jan. 12 earthquake as commander of the Disaster Medical Assistance Team OH-5, a unit within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The mission, organized in partnership with the U.S. Department of State and international groups from more than 30 countries, provided medical care to about 600 patients over the course of 10 days at an Israeli field hospital. Overall, medical personnel from the Department of Health and Human Services have treated more than 29,300 patients in Haiti. They have performed 139 surgeries and delivered 33 babies.
Devir said his team, which is based in Dayton, Ohio, has responded to hurricanes Frances, Katrina, Gustav and Ike in the United States. Team members in Pennsylvania, Washington and New York also provided assistance after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
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Written on
February 11th, 2010
By Tim Kane, Ware (Massachusetts) River News
“Gone is the Pearl of The Antilles. Haiti is now a land of bazaar interminglings, where adversity is answered with laughter and dance. Now it’s answered with scorn and rage. And now it’s all about survival. This poorest of countries has never had a break.”
Ware (Massachusetts) native Stanley Urban Jr. ‘64 wrote those words in a 1990 Miami Herald column, and they apply as much today as 20 years ago. The only addition to that statement is the 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti on Jan. 12 – the equivalent of three Hiroshima-like nuclear bombs going off at once, killing at least 194,000 people – may have broken the island’s long resolve at overcoming colossal tragedies. The small nation of 9 million needs the world’s help more than ever before.
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Written on
February 3rd, 2010
A routine training exercise in the United States turned into a high-stakes search and rescue mission in Haiti when news of the devastating earthquake reached Jochen Gliss ’02 and five teammates at Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold.
“We have equipment designed for these types of disasters, and we happened to be training with this equipment the week of the earthquake,” said Gliss, a Freeport-McMoRan program manager based in Phoenix, Arizona. “All of a sudden our training turned real.”
Freeport-McMoRan gave clearance almost immediately to abort the training exercise and join the relief efforts in Haiti. The team gathered equipment, packed and flew to Florida on Jan 15, 2010. After dealing with logistical challenges, the team arrived in Port-au-Prince on chartered plane on Jan. 18.
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Written on
February 3rd, 2010
Grace Brown ’92 waited for the tremors to pass when an earthquake interrupted a meeting Jan. 12, 2010, at a law office in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
As a long-time San Francisco resident, Brown knew how to cope with minor tremors. But the shaking intensified, and Brown quickly realized the quake was bigger than anything she had ever experienced. As she raced toward the building’s exit with her husband and other judicial reform advisers from DPK Consulting, she worried that she never again would see her 3-year-old son.
“I was going down the hallway, and all I could think of was my son,” said Brown, who was traveling for the first time without the boy since his birth. “Nothing logical goes through your head. My thought was to get out of the building and get to my son in San Francisco. I just wanted to be with him.”
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Written on
February 2nd, 2010
Many political observers have dismissed Haiti as a lost cause, but Michael Haerting ‘82 decided to visit the country in 2004 and see for himself. Haerting, a senior district manager who oversees luxury high-rise condominiums in Miami, had attended a benefit concert with his wife a few weeks prior to the trip and heard about a peasant association and university started by a Catholic priest outside Port-au-Prince.
The idea of Haitians helping themselves appealed to Haerting, and he decided to meet the Haitian clergyman who had returned to his homeland in the 1980s after studying in France and Italy.
Haitian friends in Miami warned Haerting not to make the trip because the country was too dangerous. But he took his adult son, who was studying in Miami at the time, and went anyway.
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