The Foreign Service Journal, April 2010

A P R I L 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 27 F O C U S O N T H E F S R O L E I N H A I T I ‘T HE E XPERIENCE OF A L IFETIME ’ mbassy Santo Domingo has been a key participant in the U.S. response following the Haitian earthquake — both in the Dominican Repub- lic, where embassy staff and volunteers have been provid- ing critical backup, and in Haiti, where they were among the first TDYers on the scene. We have assembled their sketches here. — Susan Maitra, Senior Editor A LL H ANDS ON D ECK I am a first-tour officer, assigned to the consular section in Santo Domingo as vice consul. My proximity to Haiti, along with the fact that I speak basic French and some Creole, put me in a position to help. Three days after the earthquake, I was escorted to a C-130 airplane at the San Isidro airport, and headed to Haiti. It was the experience of a lifetime. For much of the time, I determined who was eligible for a seat on the evacuation plane — standing at the head of a line of thousands of potential evacuees for 12 hours at a time in the hot sun, either at the airport or outside the embassy. It was heart-wrenching to witness families mak- ing difficult decisions to leave members behind in order to evacuate themselves to safety. I also adjudicated evac- uation visas and made parole recommendations in French and Creole on “the line.” Late at night, I walked around in stocking feet inside the dimly lit consulate checking records to create sealed travel packets for American citizens who had lost their passports and validating parents’ names of escorted Amer- ican-citizen children. The team did whatever was necessary at any given mo- ment. We created flight manifests and sent them to the appropriate agencies; educated evacuees about promissory notes; and provided basic needs such as water, food, baby formula and diapers. We also interacted with national and international media, escorted families to planes and main- tained communication with Embassy Port-au-Prince, Washington, D.C., and other agencies. All the while, we mourned the loss of fellow Foreign Service member Vic- toria DeLong. And all of us picked up trash, swept, mopped and scrubbed toilets to maintain sanitary conditions for Amer- ican citizens and their families camped out for days in the embassy courtyard. In the few precious hours of down- time, we squirreled away in sleeping bags in the most iso- lated cubicle or darkest storage closet we could find. In Haiti I learned that my brother, a member of the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps, had arrived off- shore on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson . We did not see each other, but regular e-mail contact helped us both endure the challenges of serving there. In the two short weeks “Team Santo Domingo” was in E MBASSY S ANTO D OMINGO HAS PLAYED A SPECIAL ROLE IN THE DISASTER RELIEF EFFORTS IN NEIGHBORING H AITI . E