It was early morning in Port-au-Prince, about three weeks after the massive earthquake that laid waste to much of Haiti's capital, and Jim Clark and Matt Cobb -- a pair of blond-haired, easygoing firefighters from the Bay Area -- were ready to start their day. Dressed in cargo pants and T-shirts, they could have belonged to any one of the emergency aid organizations or news media groups humming around the courtyard of their hotel.
Clark and Cobb, however, belonged to nothing. And that was just fine with them.
The two walked over to the hotel's tall metal gate and motioned to the armed guard that they needed to get out. In one pocket, Clark had stuffed a wad of $10 bills and, in another, he carried a fold of $20s. Cobb, trained as a medic, wore a small pack around his waist stuffed with a stethoscope and basic medical supplies.
The guard, eyeing them with a look that was part curiosity, part concern, swung open the huge, creaking gate and watched as they set out on foot down the dirt road pitted with small craters and strewn with jagged rocks.
The pair crested a small hill and came across one of the hundreds of makeshift tent encampments that have popped up across the city since the Jan. 12 earthquake. They found a woman sitting on a plastic bucket and holding her left leg aloft. Her ankle, swarming with flies, was badly swollen.
Speaking through an interpreter, the woman said concrete cinder blocks had fallen on her leg as the walls of her house collapsed during the magnitude 7.0 temblor. Cobb told her the bone was almost certainly broken and that she needed to see a doctor. If she wanted, he said, they would return with transportation to a hospital several miles away. The woman, named Islande, agreed with a nod.
Cobb punched the coordinates of the camp into a hand-held GPS mapping device and, dropping the "e," marked it as "Island camp," so they would be able to find the woman later. Clark, meanwhile, stood off to the side. He had beckoned several other women in the camp. One by one, he clasped each of their hands in a gentle shake, slipping $20 to them as he did.
"Map tan-ou," Islande said softly in Creole as the two departed. I will be waiting for you.
An estimated 600 international humanitarian groups descended on Haiti in the weeks after the earthquake. Port-au-Prince and surrounding communities are overflowing with thousands of aid workers seeking to provide food, water, medical treatment and shelter to hundreds of thousands of people. The mammoth operation has been funded with more than $4 billion in donations.
Amid such a large-scale effort -- what one United Nations official referred to as "the relief machine" -- Cobb and Clark were an oddity. Paying their own way, the two captains in Marin Countys Larkspur Fire Department signed up for vacation days, packed a huge duffel bag with medical supplies, and arrived in Haiti with only a need to help and a desire for adventure.
Their 12-day stay was a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation, in which the people they helped were simply the people whose paths they happened to cross.
"We're not delusional enough to think that we're going to solve any big problems by coming down here," Cobb said. "We know what we can offer is a band-aid, a little bridge to get someone through for a few days. But we're touching people's lives directly. Sometimes, it's the little victories that matter."
Clark, a compact, rugged 53-year-old with skin weathered from years on wildfire lines and mountain climbing, recognized the gnawing sensation he felt in the days just after the earthquake as he watched images of the destruction on television. He had felt it before, after the massive tsunami in late 2004 that killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean. He had gone to help then too, he said, ultimately spending two months in Thailand and Indonesia.
There, Clark said, he came to appreciate the contribution that well-organized aid groups make in moments of extreme crisis, but also grew wary of the big egos and outsized expectations that are sometimes on display among relief workers.
Watching the good and bad, he formed a set of rules for himself. Before departing for Haiti, he scribbled them down again in a small notebook: Be humble. You cant save the whole world. Dont promise anything you cant deliver. The only difference between you and them is where you were born.
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