Professor tells story of traveling with Haitian orphans

The air in Haiti was hard to breath, thick with the dust surrounding airplanes had swept off… The air in Haiti was hard to breath, thick with the dust surrounding airplanes had swept off the ground and into people’s eyes.

Edward Sites, a professor in Pitt’s School of Social Work, was growing weary. He had not eaten or slept since departing from Pittsburgh hours ago. His energy faded as he unloaded and arranged medical supplies for nearly five hours. He was waiting for politicians to convince the Haitian government to allow Americans Jamie and Ali McMutrie and their colleagues to take 54 orphans into the United States.

“You’re feeling fatigue, you’re feeling hunger, you’re feeling worry, frustration — frustration at wanting to help and not being able to yet,” Sites said.

Sites was one member of a team of doctors and government officials that flew to Haiti last month, making national headlines for bringing the first large group of Haitian orphans to the United States and causing controversy in the process.

He and his team members intended to bring 54 Haitian orphans to the United States, but when they landed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, they ran into a slew of obstacles.

To begin with, they were exhausted.

Their trip had been in the works for several days — since shortly after the 7.0 magnitude quake shook the impoverished country. Sites’ role in the mission, as they called it, began with a phone call from Dr. Mary Carrasco, the director of A Child’s Place at Mercy, a program in Pittsburgh’s Mercy Health System. The group provides care to abused or neglected children. Carrasco asked Sites, who has a background in child welfare, to accompany her to Haiti to make sure the volunteers transported the orphans to the United States legally. Sites immediately agreed.

At the time, the volunteers thought they would take 150 children to the United States. They prepared to take a plane that could hold 160 people. But then the Dutch and French governments joined the rescue efforts. Only 54 of the original 150 Haitian children still needed to leave the country.

At 11 a.m. on Monday, January 18, Sites boarded the Republic Airways plane that would take him and 30 physicians, nurses, politicians and other volunteers to Haiti. The volunteers filled the empty seats to the ceiling with medical supplies. The flight’s crew members unloaded the plane’s spare tires to make room for more, risking the possibility of technical difficulties. The plane carried 4,000 tons of medical supplies to Haiti.

The volunteers flew seven hours before someone told the pilot that the plane couldn’t land in Haiti. The pilot told officials that Gov. Ed Rendell was on board, and the crew eventually received permission to touch down.

Landing in Haiti was difficult.

“The control towers were knocked out by the earthquake,” Sites said. “The pilots had to use light [from bonfire], wind and speed to calculate the landing.”

Sites recalled that even the experienced pilot of the Republic Airways plane considered it a “hairy landing.”

Reporters, Army personnel and many Haitians greeted them on the runway, but Sites didn’t see any of the 54 children.

The Pittsburgh team quickly learned that the Haitian government wasn’t granting seven of the children who did not have adoptive parents in the United States permission to leave the country. Ali and Jamie McMutrie, the sisters who ran the Haitian orphanage caring for the children, refused to leave Haiti without all 54 orphans.

As an experienced social worker, Sites understood the Haitian government’s hesitance to grant the paperwork.

Human trafficking is a severe problem in Haiti. The Haitian government worried that perhaps the children in the McMutrie sisters’ orphanage had at one time been bought from their families for a nominal fee and therefore still had family somewhere in Haiti who could care for them.

“You have here what you might call conflicting interests,” Sites said. “On one hand, people want to bring [the children] to a safe place. On the other hand these children are being ripped out of their family and culture.”

The politicians on the flight, including Rendell and Rep. Jason Altmire (D-McCandless), immediately began making phone calls to attain the necessary paperwork for the seven children.

During this time, the Republic Airways plane was forced to leave the tarmac. The plane’s one-hour time limit to remain on the ground had expired. Sites and the other passengers were then stranded on the runway.

After five hours of negotiations, during which Sites helped to unload and arrange the medical supplies, the seven children received clearance to leave the country. All 54 orphans and the McMutries moved to the tarmac with a military escort.

Medical personnel lined the children up at two tents and handed each one a lollipop to cheer them up and distract them while doctors examined them under the light from gas-powered lamps and bonfires. Sites helped with the examinations and changed several children’s diapers.

Next, the volunteers and the orphans boarded a massive C-17 Air Force cargo plane and prepared to head back to Pittsburgh. However, a final headcount of the children revealed one child, 2-year-old Emma, was missing. Jamie McMutrie stayed behind until she could find Emma and return with her the next day.

Children surrounded Sites during his flight.

On his lap he held a 2-year-old child who slept the entire flight. Four children between 7 and 10 years old sat next to him on either side. These older children were “wide-eyed and interested in everything,” Sites said.

Having never experienced a plane ride before, some of the children on the flight were afraid they would fall out of the sky. Translator Smana Pamphile Clerfe assured the worried children of their safety.

During the ride, Sites and the other adults kept the children occupied with Webkinz, crayons and coloring books. Many of the children had never seen crayons before.

“We were just substitute parents for the night,” Sites said.

Following a four-and-a-half hour layover at the Homestead Air Reserve Base in Florida, Sites and the orphans arrived in Pittsburgh at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, January 19. Since their arrival, many of the orphans have been introduced to their new adoptive families from around the country.

“I feel privileged to be a part of it,” Sites said. “We were interested in saving children from degradation — properly, professionally and legally.”