3 Weeks in Haiti: An extraordinary true story of service, friendship and hope.

by Michael Andrew

Overview

In the days following the Haitian earthquake that claimed more than 230,000 lives on January 12 2010, freelance Photography Instructor Michael Andrew and fellow photographer Brian Owen traveled to the ravaged capital of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti with little more than a desire to help and the gear they could carry.

After driving through the Dominican Republic to get to Haiti, the duo make alliances with other aid workers in country, including Mathieu Louis, a naturalized American citizen of Haitian birth, who is searching for his missing family.

Abandoned and rejected by the major aid groups already on the ground, Michael and Mathieu take matters into their own hands, hiring a group of local Haitian men to help execute an unprecedented and innovative plan: using GPS technology to locate and tag orphanages that have "slipped through the cracks" of the larger relief effort and convince those in control of aid resources to support these orphanages.

This is an extraordinary true story of service, friendship, and hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780983830009
Publisher:	Maven Press
Publication date:	10/06/2011
Series:	3 Weeks in Haiti Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	321
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	1 - 18 Years

Editorial Reviews

Andrew's memoir of time spent as an independent aid worker in earthquake-stricken Haiti details the red tape faced by large aid organizations. In his straightforward prose, Andrew insightfully compares the conundrum of modern disaster response to the physics of large wheels and small wheels: "A large wheel [aid organization], due to its size and inertia, cannot accelerate as quickly as a small one." Without experience or training, Andrew, a photography teacher, goes to Haiti to help get the wheels turning. In bite-size, easy to digest chapters, he offers an inside look at large-scale emergency responses, including a look at the "Disaster Tourist"--those well-intentioned but burdensome thrill-seekers who venture to disaster areas with no means of sustaining themselves, let alone others. While emergency supplies are tied up in depots, tech savvy Andrew uses his iPhone to map GPS coordinates of local orphanages and, with his Haitian-American friend Mathieu, finds creative ways of obtaining and delivering food, water filtration systems and routes to deliver diapers via Tap Tap (rickety Haitian taxis). Unfortunately, Andrew lingers on the logistics of his adventure, such as the difficulties of charging his cellphone, while barely touching on his personal impressions of post-quake Haiti. In his first drive through leveled Port-au-Prince, he briefly compares the city to Mogadishu in the movie Black Hawk Down; this metaphorical mode of description keeps the reader at a remove, rather than walking beside Andrew through what is documented to have been utter chaos and destruction. Andrew mostly fails to describe the traumatized Haitian people, instead making broad statements that create a feeling of us versus them. "Many Haitians know that they can make more money begging and scamming than they can by honest hard work," he writes without providing much evidence. His account stays on the surface: "orphans" remain a concept, "aid" is a nicety and Andrew, as a character in this memoir, is a good guy, rather than the remarkably brave man who traveled to an unfamiliar country to help the devastated people rebuild and survive. Andrew's intentions are beyond reproach, but his tendency to preach his lessons learned without allowing readers to experience the learning alongside him makes the memoir less effective and memorable than if he were to detail in more depth the recovery he helped advance.

Kirkus Reviews