Sean Patrick Lewis is a friend of mine and we were gabbing during a break at the Television Critics Association last month when he got a message from his boss asking if he was available to go to Haiti to cover the earthquake that had just happened the previous day.

It turns out Sean, a photojournalist for ABC 7, didn’t go on that day but he did make it to Haiti a short time later. He has written of his experiences for The Advocate and I want to share some of it with you:

Many of my friends thought I couldn’t do a trip like this, leaving behind the comforts of Los Angeles lifestyle we take for granted. They said I couldn’t go without a shower, couldn’t deal with the obstacles I was to encounter, and a couple even thought I was being foolish voluntarily putting myself in harm’s way. But I knew I could do it, and covering a story like this was the reason I became a journalist.

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When we touched down at the small Port-au-Prince airport it was immediately apparent to me that we had arrived in a different world. Hundreds of people were lined up trying desperately to get out of the country, and so many others were working to get to the supplies just sitting on the tarmac. Compared to LAX, it was chaos. No traffic control tower, no real order, and the everyday rules we were used to seemed not to apply.

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The next morning we drove to the heart of the destruction. The smell of the city was unbelievable and inescapable. Death was all around us. Every fallen building had countless lives lost under the piles of rubble. It was all I could do to stay professional and not to break into tears. Our first stop was at a Catholic church that primarily did outreach to AIDS patients. It was heavily damaged and unsafe, but the sisters were still using the building because they had nowhere else to go.

Today the church had been turned into a makeshift hospital for the injured. One man who came for treatment had a large flap of muscle exposed on his right arm that had become infected. Just days before this man had been treated by the Haitian doctors and released with poor care and improper dressings. From the long line of Haitians waiting outside the structure entered a kid who had a broken leg. He would require more extensive surgery than the group we were with could provide, so we transported him in our car to the only hospital still standing, General Hospital.

I rode in a different vehicle ahead of the group shooting along the way from the back of our “tap-tap,” the local equivalent of a taxicab. As we drove I saw so many people in the streets, many trying to get on with their “normal” lives, but for most, it was just a matter of survival.

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We soon entered the dimly lit room of the main triage unit. Under the greenish glow of the flickering fluorescent lights I walked past a boy missing his left leg. I gave him a smile and he smiled back. You could tell he was happy just to be alive. Farther down the hall, in another room, I walked past a mother tightly holding her baby in bed. Its head was covered with gauze. She looked up at me, and from her expression I could tell her baby was all she had left in the world. A woman was quickly rolled past us, delivered into the triage unit room lying in a wheelbarrow. Her right hipbone was completely exposed and white with infection. It had been exposed since she was injured in the earthquake nearly seven days earlier. She was one of the many in Haiti suffering from HIV — the small nation has the largest number of people living with the virus in the Caribbean. There was nothing they could do to save her and she was made as comfortable as possible to die. A girl walked in with her older sister. She was told the big toe on her left foot would need to be removed because of the infection that had set in from days of going untreated. The look on her face spoke to her pain and fear. This look was an expression I would see many times over before I left the country.
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The next few days in Haiti before we left for home were hard. They weren’t hard because we went without a shower the entire time or because we lacked sufficient water. No, what was really hard was knowing that we were headed back home and would be escaping this, and this — well this was the Haitians’ home. The roads were often impassable because fallen buildings and traffic, and it seemed unimaginable that this country could be rebuilt, but somehow these people had hope and didn’t give up. This is the kind of hope we all need to have, to never give up. The trip to Haiti was heavy stuff, but this is why I became a journalist. The world needs to know about the suffering, about the problems this country faces, and hopefully this message being delivered will bring more helpto  a population needing all it can get.

This was my experience of a lifetime. If you haven’t already, take a moment sometime to leave your comfort zone for just a bit, open your mind to what really matters in life, and see just how fortunate we really are. Have that experience of a lifetime for yourself. It’ll change you for the better; I know it did for me.

Go to Advocate.com to read Sean’s column in its entirety and to see more of his photos.

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