Some Good News at the End of an Eight-year Journey…
“Bad news travels at the speed of light. Good news travels like molasses.”
Comedian Tracy Morgan’s 2014 quote about the Internet is even more true today. With that in mind, I have some good news to share. It was a long time coming, but well worth the wait.
This story begins on January 12, 2010. I was working as a producer of The CBS Evening News, and slightly after 5pm I read an AP report of an earthquake in Haiti. As is often the case with those initial dispatches, details were sketchy.
The network news gatherers worked the phones to learn more, but by the 6:30pm broadcast there was still no video, and no real sense of how bad this was or what a magnitude 7 quake would mean for an island nation like Haiti.
Within hours, we would learn the damage was immeasurable.
Katie Couric and I were dispatched to cover the quake along with a small but mighty team from the network.
We would fly through the night, first to Miami and then to the Dominican Republic.
I’m not sure how the idea came to me, but I remember stuffing my pockets and backpack with airplane peanuts and granola bars.
“Some for me, some for anyone I meet who needs food,” I thought.
Once we arrived in Port-au-Prince and laid eyes on the gruesome scene, I realized how naïve that was.
It looked like a war zone. A cameraman who had covered the civil war in Sierra Leone told me this was the worst thing he’d witnessed. Buildings were flattened and bodies were in piles on street corners and curbs.
On the second day of reporting, we found a medical tent run by a Belgian team of first responders. There, we met a 13-year-old boy named Larousse Pierre. He was badly injured, with a gash across his forehead and a broken leg. His agony and screams, the island heat and huddled masses of wounded people, surrounded us like flames.
Katie knelt down in the tent and took his hand.
“Squeeze,” she told him. “Squeeze hard.” He spoke no English, but he gazed up at her and followed her instructions as doctors set his leg. No pain killers or plaster cast in sight.
Larousse, orphaned in the quake, became the face of Haiti for us.
He was the symbol of a nation suffering the greatest of indignities and tragedies just a few hundred miles south of the United States.
I left Haiti at the end of that week. Haiti never left me.
Over the years, we’ve continued to follow up on the situation there. I’d like to say a lot has changed or improved, but I know that isn’t really true. Still, life has continued for those lucky enough to move on from that brutal January day.
In 2015, while leading the news video team at Yahoo, I dispatched a producer to shoot a piece in Haiti and try to find Larousse. Amazingly, with the help of an intrepid fixer, he did.
Sensing that Larousse was still very much in need, Katie connected him to Jane Aronson’s incredible Worldwide Orphans Foundation. Her help and generosity combined with Jane’s incomparable expertise were about to change the boy’s life once again, this time for the better.
That brings me to the good news. Sorry if arriving here was as “slow as molasses,” but it is also just as sweet.
On Monday night, I joined Katie and Larousse at a WWO benefit in Manhattan where he was honored for his success, and she for her compassion.
Seeing him again, this time well and happy, was the kind of button you very rarely get on stories in the news business. He’s in high school, getting good grades, and in a stable home environment. Someday, he hopes to be a social worker.
There’s a famous line from the poet Rumi, “The wound is where the light enters you.”
Haiti has a long way to go, and Larousse has a lot more living ahead, but my images of that dark medical tent have finally been replaced. We have a new photo of Larousse, this time smiling and full of hope. The light found its way in.