Author’s Flashback: My Haiti Mercy Mission After the 2010 Earthquake

By Stephen Hanks
Author’s Note: This week marks 11 years since I made a spontaneous decision to join a small group on a humanitarian trip to Haiti to help earthquake recovery efforts in whatever way I could. A few days after I returned from what was a totally surreal experience, I wrote the following essay on my Facebook page. A year later, I composed an updated version for the local Brooklyn newspaper Caribbean Life. I’ve added a postscript with updated information on the post-earthquake situation in Haiti 11 years later.

THREE MONTHS AFTER THE 2010 EARTHQUAKE IN HAITI, I FOUND MYSELF CLEARING THE RUBBLE OUT OF TENT THAT WAS SERVING AS THE HOME FOR A LARGE FAMILY LEFT HOMELESS BY THE QUAKE.

When I finally arrived home in Brooklyn at 5AM on April 1, 2010 after eight days witnessing the despair, destruction, and devastation of the approximately 30-second earthquake that ravaged the country of Haiti less than three months before on January 12, I felt as exhausted and hungry as I’ve ever felt in my life. But after observing the determination of a courageous and proud people to survive and overcome their trauma, I also never felt so compelled NOT to complain about it. In fact, my Haiti adventure, coming on the heels of losing my job as Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of a magazine, was the first period in a very long time I didn’t feel almost entirely self-absorbed.

That didn’t mean I wasn’t ecstatic to finally land in my own bed after not sleeping more than three hours a night for a week (which culminated in an almost 16-hour ordeal on the return trip to New York). I was especially looking forward to squeezing in one Passover meal before the holiday week ran out, and my wife Bea and daughter Jean had planned a special dinner for me for Saturday night, which was just about the time I finally woke up since arriving home on Thursday.

So after the traditional Passover seder feast, I camped out beach-whale like on the couch in front of the television to partake in another Jewish holiday tradition — watching the 1956 epic film The Ten Commandments for the umpteenth time and reveling in how much of the script I could recite before the actors delivered the lines (“The strong make many, the weak make few, the dead make none!”). But there was another reason I wanted to watch the film post-Haiti trip. I was searching for some kind of parable in the story line that might relate to what I had felt and experienced before and during the mission, which was sponsored…