Next week – like he’s done so many times over the last four years – surgeon Herold Noel will travel from Long Beach to his native Haiti to deliver food and clothing collected by his non-profit organization; just two weeks after the entire country crumbled before his own eyes.
The truck sits motionlessly in a central Long Beach parking lot; a massive Ford F-450 carrying a metal bed that is perfect for transporting heavy loads. Next to the truck are two large, black trailers. Each is stamped on the side with a red-white-and-blue logo that says “Haitian American Food Bank.”
Today, they are empty. But within a week, they will be filled to the brim with mountains of food, toiletries and other non-perishable items that have been donated to the Haitian American Food Bank at 17th Street in Long Beach.
Once they are full, they will be driven to Miami Beach, Florida by Herold Noel and his 18-year old son, Harry (they will make the 2,750-mile drive in just under 48 hours). The truck and trailers will be loaded onto a boat while the Noels fly to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, make the 6-8 hour drive to cross over the Haitian border before meeting the boat at the port of Miragoâne, a coastal Haitian village that was devastated in last week’s earthquake, about 80 miles west of Port-au-Prince.
Miragoâne is the birthplace of Herold Noel’s father, and most of that side of his family still lives there. Noel himself was born in the capital city of Port-au-Prince and lived there until he was 14, when his parents packed up and moved the family to Brooklyn. The opportunity of the United States has afforded Noel an excellent education and a prosperous career over the last 35 years, but he is Haitian through and through. This is what makes the Haitian American Food Bank so successful.
Noel not only collects and transports the donated goods himself, he will also distribute it into the waiting arms of poor Haitians in cities that have been forgotten or were never really known to begin with. He knows the pastors, the teachers, the community leaders in nearly every village along the entire western arm of the coast, and they will tell him what is needed and where, and he will go to the people that need his help the most and he will give them whatever he can; whatever people in the faraway land of Los Angeles could spare. No goods will be lost in the journey; nothing will be intercepted by soldiers or the government; none of the food will end up in supermarkets or in the hands of street vendors. Noel knows where the need is and he will go there.
We sit in his nearly featureless office in a small rented building on 17th Street, near PCH & Magnolia, and Noel tells me how he seized the opportunities afforded to him in America, how he became a surgeon and traveled the world to help those who couldn’t afford operations, how he traveled to Haiti about five years ago for the first time since he was 14, and how he soon after founded the Haitian American Food Bank and began to deliver goods to his native country every six months.
We have been speaking for a full hour before Noel mentions that he was in Haiti when the ground began to shake.
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On the morning of January 12, Herold Noel woke up to a beautiful day in Haiti from his Miragoâne hotel room. He was in the middle of yet another mission to deliver food and goods to the residents of his native land, and had plans to meet with a local pastor to cook and serve rice and corn to hungry Haitians.
But first, Noel met with his uncle. An old man, the brother of Noel’s father owned land in Miragoâne that had been in the family’s hands for decades.
“I was talking to him at 10 o’clock that morning,” Noel says. “We made plans to visit my parents in Florida, we talked about the last time he came to visit and he couldn’t believe there were so many people at the beach in Miami. ‘The water is so clean,’ he said. We were just sitting there, talking.”
They parted ways. Noel thought that he might relax in his hotel, but the pastor he worked with called his room. He told Noel that it was time to begin cooking food for the people, but it was a beautiful day and Noel was tempted to spend the day at the pool. The pastor insisted, and the voice inside Noel’s head reminded him that this was his purpose. He left the hotel.
“We had a line of people waiting as we were cooking corn, rice, plantains and things like that,” Noel says. A long line awaited patiently; people in Miragoâne are poor and the unemployment rate is high. The promise of food was a big deal.
Without warning, Noel says, he heard a great noise and turned to his left to see smoke rising into the sky. It was coming from a school building. In a matter of seconds, the structure broke off into pieces and crumbled to the ground. People began to scream. Noel says it all happened so quickly that he did not feel the 7.0-magnitude earthquake beneath his feet.
“I see all of this smoke and I thought, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ My first thought was that someone missed the United States – Al Qaeda or something – and accidentally attacked Haiti. In the history of Haiti, no one worries about earthquakes.”
A car next to him was flung four feet into the air, as if it weighed nothing. A nearby freeway broke into segments and collapsed. “It just opened up,” Noel says. Realizing something was terribly wrong, he and hundreds more ran into a nearby cornfield, unsure of what to do next. They ducked, paralyzed with fear, gaining the courage to venture out into the city and fleeing back to the cornfield when the aftershocks began. It was hours before they were able to assess the damage.
Noel’s hotel was reduced to rubble. His suitcase and briefcase were still inside and remain there to this day. If the pastor hadn’t coaxed him outside, Noel would be too. Nearly every building in Miragoâne – built of brick to protect against hurricanes – had been destroyed. The horizon was visible in all directions. “Everything was flattened, like somebody took a razor blade and shaved Haiti,” he says. “I thought I’d seen it all. But this was a nightmare.”
He ran to his uncle’s house. Nothing remained. Noel spent the rest of the day and night pulling the bodies of his uncle, six cousins and six other relatives from the remnants of the worst disaster in the history of the Western Hemisphere.
Noel gave the pastor the key to his warehouse, packed with the goods that he had brought to deliver to the people. He told the pastor to dispense the goods as he saw fit, while Noel and a colleague set off for Port-au-Prince.
*
It was five years ago that Noel’s father suffered a stroke that nearly took his life. After surviving such a scare, and in the midst of old age, he asked that he be given the chance to visit his native land one last time. It had been 30 years since the family left for the promise of America, and Noel had not been back since. But he agreed to accompany his father. As a surgeon, he had traveled the world and conducted humanitarian missions in the heat-scarred hills of Mexico and the desolate regions of Kenya and Botswana. He looked forward to returning to the tropical paradise that he remembered as a child.
“I thought Haiti was a rich nation,” Noel remembers. “When we arrived at the airport I couldn’t believe it. People were fighting in the streets just to beg us for money. I said to my dad, ‘I thought that only in Africa did this kind of thing occur.’ I could not believe that something like that could happen so close to the United States.”
The trip was an eye-opener in more ways than one. Noel sounds disgusted when describing the effects of a country that degraded itself into chaos with government corruption and a lack of control. But he was also overcome with compassion for the innocent residents who were simply trying to get by, many of them on less than one dollar per day. Even in extreme poverty, Noel says, Haitians live each day with great pride. Men wear a shirt and tie. They are more than willing to work – when there is opportunity. The problem is a lack of opportunity. The nation’s unemployment rate was higher than 60% before the earthquake hit.
Noel saw an opportunity to step in and help.
“I told my dad, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work, but I’m going to open a Haitian food bank.’”
He returned to Southern California – where he has lived since 1987 – and began plans to open the Haitian American Food Bank at the 17th Street location in Long Beach. For the past four years, Noel has collected food, clothes anything that people can spare, and delivered them directly into the arms of waiting Haitians about every six months. Many people bring goods to the office, but Noel is more than willing to come to them. If anyone calls his office and says that they have something to donate, Noel will hop into the truck and come to them. “If I can make it there and back in a day, I will go,” he says with an ever-present grin. “It might be hard on me for a while but it will mean a great deal for someone in Haiti.”
As people have become more familiar with Noel, and more comfortable knowing that what they donate will certainly reach those in need, he’s had great success. The storage room in the back of his office is stuffed from floor to ceiling with bottled water, canned foods, bulging trash bags marked “CLOTHES” in magic marker. In the last two weeks, the response has been overwhelming. The last time Noel went to Haiti, he brought 250 bags of rice that he estimates fed more than 5,000 people. When he leaves again next Friday, Noel says that he will have somewhere between 2,000-5,000 bags of rice.
“As soon as we get our truck full, we’ll take what we’ve collected to the people,” he says. “These people that live in the south in huts, they’re not seeing any help and they’re not going to see it. Unless we go there to help.”
*
After the earthquake, Noel and his colleague hitched rides on the backs of motorcycles all the way to Port-au-Prince. They tried to help but realized there was not much that could be done. Desperate people tried to lift concrete slabs by hand, attempted to break through them with sticks. They decided to leave for the neighboring Dominican Republic and luckily caught a flight out of Santo Domingo. Noel has been planning his return ever since.
His phone has not stopped ringing. Noel works with pastors in four churches across the nation and has made connections with many other residents, and all kept him busy with their pleas for help. Noel has been driving all over Southern California to gather whatever people can give. He says that any non-perishable item is great, with an emphasis on canned foods and toiletries. Even mattresses will make a huge difference, he says. He has run himself ragged in the last week to ensure that he will return with enough goods to make a difference. Maybe it was adrenaline, maybe it was denial, but Noel had not taken time to accept the tragedy.
It caught up with him on a recent drive. Noel was on the freeway and headed to Ventura County when his phone rang. Noel had been worried about a doctor he knew in Haiti, who he had not heard from. A friend called to tell him that they had found the doctor, crushed under a fallen building.
“I had to stop the car,” he says. “I’m not one to believe in crying. But that was the point when it hit me. He was such a good doctor. I asked God, why did he have to die?”
For the first time since he left Haiti, he sat in the huge truck on the side of the 101 Freeway and thought of his uncle and his cousins and allowed himself to feel the pain. “Why God? Why did this happen?” he asked. “And I thought, ‘You know something? This is what life is all about. The experience.’ God puts us through tests so we can learn from them.”
*
After making more than 20 of these missions to Haiti, Noel has learned the best ways to navigate the many obstacles in his path. As he excitedly explains how he will fly to Santo Domingo and drive to Miragoâne – home of one of the nation’s only open ports – he begins drawing a map from memory. “The ship will come from Florida and make it here,” he says, circling a spot in the ocean just off the coast. But, you ask, won’t it be crowded at the port? “It will be crowded,” he says, “So we will borrow boats from local fishermen and paddle out to the boat to get the supplies.”
The map of Haiti that Noel draws from memory during our meeting.
He leans back in his chair with a proud smile, sure that he has bypassed the problem of bottlenecked traffic as relief organizations swarm into Haiti. This has become a major problem as residents anxiously await much-needed supplies that are within sight but out of reach. Noel’s plan seems far-fetched, but it also may be the best chance that those in need will have to survive.
“That’s the advantage we have, we know all the ins and outs on how to help,” Noel says. “We need somebody there that knows what they’re doing. We need people that can get goods directly into the hands of the people.”
This has been another major issue since the earthquake hit, Noel says, since most relief has been centered around the capital city of Port-au-Prince while there are needy survivors throughout the entire country. “They’re concentrating on the hotels, the stores, the government buildings. Meanwhile, you can see guys on the streets going, ‘Hey, what about us?’” Noel plans to visit at least six cities along the Haitian coast, bringing aid directly to the people who need it most.
His mission has never been a popular one with authorities. At first, he says, the Haitian government insisted that all goods be delivered to them and then dispersed as they saw fit. The items would be in good hands, they assured him, but Noel worried that the food would end up in stores and not in needy stomachs. He learned to bypass the government by shipping everything himself.
Often, there were problems with military officers attempting to intercept deliveries. As Noel and others began to hand out food, officers would demand food for their families or the event would be shut down. But the hungry Haitians became angry and the soldiers backed off. “People power is more important than guns,” Noel says, again with a smile.
*
Maybe he is just an optimistic man, but Noel sees opportunity in Haiti because the problems facing the nation are fixable. Personal hygiene issues can lead to death, but that can be solved by educating people about washing their hands and wearing shoes. Without a sewer system, poisoned rivers make any fish that are caught completely inedible; but Noel has shown agriculture students how to create fisheries. He even thinks that the earthquake aftermath could create opportunity.
Haiti suffers from an unemployment rate greater than 60%, but now the nation must be rebuilt. Noel believes that this will lead to a boom in construction jobs, and substantial revenue as new companies move in to stake their claim in Haiti.
“There are billions and billions of dollars to be made,” he says. “I am optimistic that America will lead construction and bring business. I have heard that Edison is already on the ground and attempting to build electric stations. I would hope that the Haitian and American governments would take this opportunity to improve things.”
Until then, Noel will take the opportunity upon himself, delivering to the people and imparting his mission onto his 18-year old son, who accompanied his dad to Haiti for the first time one year ago and began crying on the flight home, overcome by the suffering he’d seen. He has since shown an interest in humanitarian medicine, like his father.
“I told him that if you go into it for the money, you’re not going to be a very good surgeon. You have to do it for the human in you. There is a small voice that says, ‘Why are you doing this?’ But there is a bigger voice that says, ‘If you can help, you do it.’”
That voice may be Noel’s driving force, but it will not be able to numb him to the harsh reality of the horror that has occurred on the ground in Haiti. Some reports say that nearly 200,000 have died. Noel admits that it will be some time before any accurate count can be made; there is just not enough organization to determine the damage. But he does know that each and every day, survivors are being pulled from the rubble – even after spending more than one week under concrete. Friends in Haiti call him each day to deliver bad news, but also to share the joy of saving a life. In a situation that at times can seem hopeless, there is always something that can be done.
“You’ve got to keep hope alive,” Noel says. “You never know. Life will surprise you.”
Click here to visit the Haitian American Food Bank website. You can arrange a donation for drop-off or pick-up by calling 562.436.5500.