The Foreign Service Journal, June 2010

J U N E 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 25 States. Of course, our people on the ground in Port-au-Prince were ready to leap into action. Houses were destroyed; people were sleeping in their offices on the floor, on cots and in tents. When you think about the amount of work they were able to do 24/7, it really was quite amazing. I am always proud to lead CA, but I could not have been prouder of how proactive and re- sponsive people were, always think- ing about others and not themselves. In less than three weeks, we evacu- ated over 16,000 people, which was more than we evacuated from Le- banon in 2006. It will be years be- fore Haiti fully recovers; we are now moving into a new phase, focusing on trying to reunite families through im- migrant visas. RM: How long after the actual earthquake did you realize that the media and the American public would become fixated on the subject of orphans in Haiti? A/S Jacobs: After any natural disaster, any time there are images of suffering children on the television screen or in newspapers, there is an outpouring of love and interest from the American public. People decide in front of their TV screens that they want to adopt. I am especially proud of what we did to facilitate children who were in the process of being adopted. Work- ing with U.S. Citizen and Immigra- tion Services, just days after the earthquake, we set up a humanitarian parole program to bring children into the United States who were already in the process of being F O C U S “Many times overseas when we’ve been out there helping Americans in a crisis, diplomatic colleagues from other embassies call me to ask what we’re doing and how they should help their own nationals.”