Wednesday, January 20, 2010
PITTSBURGH (AP) — Jamie and Alison McMutrie were in their car on a routine shopping trip in Port-au-Prince when they heard a huge explosion. The market they were headed for disappeared on the horizon. The roads around them undulated like the ocean.
Confused and terrified, the sisters didn’t understand what was happening to them — or around them.
Quickly, they realized they had survived a powerful earthquake, the beginning of a story of courage, persistence and doggedness that led to the successful rescue of 54 Haitian orphans in their care.
The story is as much about the McMutrie sisters as it is about the orphans, most of whom were awaiting only paperwork to leave their lives in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest countries for new lives in some of the world’s richest nations — including the United States, Canada and Spain.
The first chapter ended Tuesday, when 53 orphans arrived in Pittsburgh after a daring mission that involved officials in the White House, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and even required Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell to fly along with the 21‚Ñ2 tons of equipment and medical personnel to the earthquake-torn Caribbean nation.
“Our government, the Homeland Security, state department, the Department of Defense, the White House, they were fantastic in making this all come together,” said Leslie Merrill McCombs, a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center official who was instrumental in planning and overseeing the mission.
The last orphan — 2-year-old Emma — arrived later Tuesday with Jamie, who got off the military plane just before it left the Port-au-Prince tarmac when she realized a child was missing. The child was found a short time later in the U.S. Embassy, and Jamie and the toddler got on a later flight for Florida.
“I’m Ali to them, but when they’re there, my sister and I are their moms. We have a family. We don’t have a group of kids who just get fed,” Alison McMutrie, who turned 22 Tuesday, said at a news conference at the airport shortly after their arrival in Pittsburgh.
“We have a family who all love each other and care about each other. And to be asked to leave without a single one of them was just not an option,” said McMutrie, who followed her older sister to Haiti about two years ago. Jamie moved to the Caribbean nation in 2006 to work full time at the BRESMA orphanage.
The children, age 11 months to 12 years, went from the airport to the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, where they received medical examinations before being placed in foster homes to await adoption. All but seven have already been placed with families and McCombs says hundreds of people have expressed interest in adopting them.
The group is one of the first to leave Haiti’s post-earthquake rubble, and McCombs hopes the hurdles they overcame will help save hundreds of other orphans trapped in similar situations. Dozens of orphanages have already contacted them, describing dire circumstances, including dead children, McCombs said.
“We were told by the State Department that what we did would probably be the breakthrough,” Rendell said at a news conference in Harrisburg after returning from Haiti. “It will open up a lot of orphans being able to go to the U.S.”
The trip began early Monday after days of preparation and pleas on Facebook and Twitter describing the dangers the children could face as water and food supplies dwindled. The group, Alison said, never ran out of supplies but were running low, and it was clear some of the children were dehydrated.
Still, the journey was rife with obstacles. When the group boarded the plane for Florida, they knew they were missing waivers for some of the children.
Despite spending Friday and Saturday hiding from gunshots and looters, the McMutrie sisters were adamantly opposed to leaving any children behind.
The group left Pittsburgh for Florida hoping the paperwork would resolve itself en route. But even after arriving in Port-au-Prince, matters were not settled. Their plane was able only to remain on the tarmac for a limited time. People milled on the tarmac, mobbing the jet.
“It was really, really like a war zone. I’d never seen anything like it,” McCombs said.
The paperwork, however, was not complete, and the jet left without them.
McCombs and a handful of others, including Rendell’s wife, headed for the U.S. Embassy. There they found the children and the McMutries holed up in vans, the windows and doors shut for fear of being taken, sweating in 90-degree heat, many children coughing, vomiting and suffering from diarrhea.
“We got on the van, and they starting singing; they were clapping and giving us high fives. They were saying prayers,” an emotional McCombs said. “It was amazing.”
Finally, after the highest levels of the U.S. government got involved, the waivers allowing the children to enter the country without visas or adoption papers were ready.
The group boarded a C-17 military cargo plane, the children buckled into canvas slings along the sides, clothing, toys, food, Pediolite and water in the center.
“It was a little surreal being in the belly of this huge transport plane that usually transports tanks and vehicles and we’re transporting 53 orphans,” said Mark Shepard, president of the board of Catholic Charities in Pittsburgh, whose group helped arrange the mission and will help with the adoptions.
The children sang and laughed, not fearful of flying despite having never been on a plane, McCombs said. They were enthralled by the coloring books and crayons. “Have you met your mommy and daddy,” she asked the children in turn, and most nodded their little heads.
Except Stanley. “I don’t have a family. Do you want to be my family?” the 10-year-old boy asked McCombs. She covered her tears as she relayed the story.
The McMutrie sisters are determined to return yet again to Haiti and continue their mission of helping the orphans of a country long-ravaged by poverty and now suffering the aftershock of a natural disaster.
“I’m so proud to bring these kids back to Pittsburgh,” Alison McMutrie said. “I think I’m dreaming and I don’t know when I’m going to wake up.”