It’s Sunday April 11th 21:50 EST as I type this. I’m sitting, together with 3 other Haiti Connect volunteers, in the departures lounge of Miami International Airport waiting for the check-in desk for our Vision Airlines flight to Port au Prince to open. Unfortunately that’s not for another 6.5 hours. It’s obviously going to be a long night.
Not that waiting is something we haven’t done before. The last week has been one of “hurry up and wait”. We left Ireland on Saturday morning on a Continental Airlines flight for Fort Lauderdale. The flight was long but uneventful. No turbulence, mid-air collisions or other mishaps. In Fort Lauderdale we hooked up with Kira who had flown in from NYC the day before. Once we picked up our rental car it was off to the hotel in Deerfield Beach for some R&R. This consisted of some Italian food followed by an early night.
The next few days went by in a blur of unpacking equipment, checking it, configuring it, packing it and putting it on pallets. The amount of equipment we have received was huge and it all had to be checked and counted. The configuration of the wifi equipment from both Aruba Networks and Xirrus was slightly challenging as neither Chris or myself had ever worked with it before. However by tapping into our support network for advice and guidance we were able to familiarise ourselves with it and get it working just the way we wanted.
The next hurdle was getting the equipment and ourselves transported to Haiti. We had made arrangement for this and it was being provided free of charge. However firming up on this provided a bit of a challenge. It took days to get a firm answer and on Wednesday we found out that we had transport by boat for the equipment but that there was no transport for the team. We spent the next two days frantically tapping all our contacts mainly via Twitter & email. On Friday we were put in contact with an organisation called “Airline Ambassadors” who offered us flights on a plane leaving Miami on Monday morning early. Great news obviously!
However this was not the end of the delays. The shipping container that needed to be loaded with our equipment did not arrive until late Friday which meant that it would not be collected before Saturday. Or that’s what we thought….. Apparently we needed to put a seal on the container for customs and this seal needed to be Fedex’d to us from Miami. Bring on Saturday. At this point we had all equipment packed and were ready to go since Friday. The seal did not arrive at our hotel until 2 pm on Saturday and we spent the day going around Ft. Lauderdale waiting for a call from the truck driver who was going to collect the container. The call never came.
Bring on Sunday. On Sunday we found out that the container would not be picked up until Monday morning. Sigh. By that time we would already be in Haiti and there was no way that we would be present to seal the container. Luckily the guys from HyPower who let us use their yard and trailer for the past few months came to the rescue. The would supervise the collection of the container and would ensure that it was sealed properly. These guys have saved our lives on more than one occasion now. All these delays mean however that we have to move our return dates back a few days. Otherwise we would be departing within a day of the equipment arriving.
So that brings me back to Sunday evening 21:50. We just dropped the car of and were victim of the usual rip-off. Hotel charges and car rentals for the last week have already taken a sizeable bite out of our cash reserve. Luckily there are several ongoing efforts by the Irish home-front to raise more funds. But obviously, just in case that you, the reader of this blog wants to contribute, we are still very much in need of more donations.
So tomorrow, and the rest of the week will be hectic. We will arrive in Port au Prince at 8:45 in the morning where we will be picked up by our security guy and driver. Then it’s off to our home in Haiti. We’ll only have time to drop of our bags before Kira and I will have to go back to Port au Prince for the first of what will be a string of meetings that will take up most of the first few days in Haiti. We have to meet up with all the organisations and people who we have been speaking to over the last few months and firm up on agreements and promises. On top of that Chris and I will start deciding what locations will be connected first and carry out the first site surveys to determine what network setup is needed. And there will off course be the usual domestic arrangements that need to be taken care of. I expect more hurry up and wait…
So am I regretting this already? Hell no! It is fantastic to see what a small but determined group of people can accomplish and what’s even more amazing is the fantastic support we have received so far. We’re setting out to do something good and a few delays are not going to stop us. Watch this space.
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[...] The dust has settled since the first few volunteers have returned from Haiti and it’s time for an update on our progress. After months of preparations, conference calls and equipment gathering our first team departed for Haiti on Saturday April 3rd. Three volunteers flew from Shannon, Ireland via Newark to Ft. Lauderdale where they were joined by a fourth volunteer who had flown in from NYC the previous day. We were booked into a motel in Deerfield Beach only a short distance from the ayard where our staging facility was. We had originally planned to stay in Deerfield for 4 days before flying onwards to Haiti. However due to hiccups beyond our control we did not leave for Haiti until April 11th. The transport that we had been assured would be available fell through and we ended up having to arrange sea transport for the equipment and seperate flights for the volunteers. As we did not really have the budget to pay commercial rates we had to work our network of contacts to find someone willing to provide transport and to pick up the tab. Luckily we found both the Bridge Foundation willing to provide sea-transport for our equipment and Airline Ambassadors to provide flights for a very minimal fee. Organisations like these are hardly ever heard from but they provide an invaluable service. While we were very happy to have this arranged the whole thing costs us a lot of time. You can read more about it here. [...]
[...] The dust has settled since the first few volunteers have returned from Haiti and it’s time for an update on our progress. After months of preparations, conference calls and equipment gathering our first team departed for Haiti on Saturday April 3rd. Three volunteers flew from Shannon, Ireland via Newark to Ft. Lauderdale where they were joined by a fourth volunteer who had flown in from NYC the previous day. We were booked into a motel in Deerfield Beach only a short distance from the ayard where our staging facility was. We had originally planned to stay in Deerfield for 4 days before flying onwards to Haiti. However due to hiccups beyond our control we did not leave for Haiti until April 11th. The transport that we had been assured would be available fell through and we ended up having to arrange sea transport for the equipment and seperate flights for the volunteers. As we did not really have the budget to pay commercial rates we had to work our network of contacts to find someone willing to provide transport and to pick up the tab. Luckily we found both the Bridge Foundation willing to provide sea-transport for our equipment and Airline Ambassadors to provide flights for a very minimal fee. Organisations like these are hardly ever heard from but they provide an invaluable service. While we were very happy to have this arranged the whole thing costs us a lot of time. You can read more about it here. [...]
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