Earlier this month, Herold Noel, a surgeon and president and CEO of the Long Beach-based Haitian American Food Bank, did what he has done every two to three months for the last five years: deliver food, water and other necessities to the poorest parts of Haiti.

On Jan. 12, Noel left his Miragoane hotel to meet with his uncle and catch up on old times. After they parted ways, Noel returned to his room, only to be summoned by a local pastor with whom he had worked on several occasions.

He wanted Noel to begin cooking food for the hundreds of people they expected to line up that day. As Noel cooked corn, rice, plantains and other staples of island cuisine, the ground began to shake under his feet. In the course of 30 seconds, he said, the structure broke into pieces and began to crumble. He thought the nation was under attack, but it was actually the force of a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck the nation, claiming an untold number of lives that, at the final tally, is likely to reach well past 100,000 victims.

As he exited the building, he noticed that “buildings had crumbled all around us,” he said. “It was something I just could not digest. I had never seen anything like this happen. I could not believe it happened to my own country. It is like the country just disappeared.”

A nearby freeway also collapsed. Noel attempted to return to the city, but aftershocks caused him to flee to a cornfield. Once safe, Noel returned to his hotel, which was completely demolished. He then ran to his uncle’s house, but nothing remained. The next several hours were spent digging up the remains of his uncle, six cousins and other relatives. He estimates that on that block alone, roughly 200 bodies were lying in the street.

“My uncle died, my cousins and others also died,” he said. His uncle, he said, was one of thousands of bodies placed in a makeshift morgue. “The people there need to be buried with respect. We tried to get his [uncle’s] body, but it was so badly damaged that we were given no choice. You could already begin to smell the bodies. I never thought we would bury my uncle that way.”

Seeing that the more than estimated one million now homeless needed his aid more than ever, Noel took a flight from Haiti to the Dominican Republic to Florida and finally back to California three days later.

Since then, he has been working tirelessly to collect food, water, clothes and other items to take back.

During his most recent trip, Noel had taken 250 bags of rice, amongst other items. That, he estimated, fed more than 5,000 people, “but it’s never enough,” he said, “there are too many people in need, we run out of food. We try to do our best, we try to raise as much money here.”

When he, his 18-year-old son and other staff arrive in Haiti on Tuesday, they will have anywhere between 2,000 to 5,000 bags of rice, along with water, medical supplies, medication, toys, cookware, drapes, diapers, hygiene products, and others provided by local communities and organizations. The items will be packed into a truck and at least two trailers, which will be driven to Florida before being shipped by boat to Miragoane, a coastal Haitian Village. Meanwhile, Noel and others will fly to the Dominican Republic, then drive to Miragoane, where they will meet the boat.

They plan to remain there for a week, then head back to California where they “will do it all over again,” said Noel. “I have to keep going, I have to get there as soon as I can,” he said. “The worse part is that my family keeps calling me asking me ‘when are you coming? We can’t take it anymore, we are dying because there is no water, there is nothing.’ It is very heartbreaking but at least I’m alive and I have the opportunity to come back to L.A. and provide for them. I just tell them ‘don’t worry, it may be a couple of days but I will be there definitely.’”

When he returns, he will not only collect more items but will seek to collaborate with nonprofits and surrounding communities to secure such items as tents, motor homes and trailers that can act as temporary shelter. In addition, he will continue outreach to architects to create permanent shelter that will be able to withstand natural disasters. The buildings that once stood were mostly made of brick — meant to withstand hurricanes and strong winds, but not stable enough to endure a major earthquake.

Many Haitians, he said, are living outdoors in makeshift tents cobbled together with sticks, sheets, articles of clothing and any other materials they can find. Some government officials, he said, are “living in the streets and in tents themselves.”

He fears most that those in the areas outside Port-au-Prince will suffer most, with so much relief focused on the capital. “They have forgotten about the outskirts, those where people are living in villages, that is where people are still dying,” he said. “They have no food or water and no way to communicate or make it into the main city because they have no vehicle and if they do, it is difficult to make it through the rubble. They will not see help unless we give it to them.”

This concerns California for Haiti advocate Martine Jean, who along with four others spoke with The Wave this week at Kassava, a Haitian restaurant in West L.A. that has been involved in several fundraisers and is currently receiving donations to be given to Noel before his departure. It is donating 10 percent of its net profit to Haiti as well as the proceeds from the sale of various hand-crafted items.

“What a lot of us are concerned about now is that the hurricane season is coming to Haiti. That starts around May,” said Jean, who has two relatives still unaccounted for on the island. “We have a situation where over a million people are homeless right now, they are sleeping in the streets and some of them have makeshift tents and you have a hurricane season that is about to descend upon a country that is torn apart right now.”

She estimated that her hometown, Jacmel, has been 75 percent destroyed. With a younger cousin and his father still missing, Jean has been trying to call and has even sent people on the ground to look in their neighborhood — but the house was completely demolished. There is no way of knowing whether they were in the structure or not.

“You feel relieved when you hear about people who get out alive,” she said, “but then you start thinking about how they are going to survive now. It’s just a horrible situation.”

Even more alarming are what she perceives to be the long-term emotional effects of the calamity. “Imagine people being trapped underground, entombed for eight to 11 days and then being next to dead bodies. It is traumatizing,” she said. “They are in shock, they have no where to go. It is like someone dropping a bomb on you and you don’t even know it. These people are scarred for life.”
So are local Haitian-Americans, who are experiencing a feeling of “helplessness,” according to Eve Alexandre. She was on a film shoot when fellow crew members, who knew she was Haitian, came to offer condolences. She then began receiving calls from friends, and when she went online, the realities began to sink in.

With a number of her brothers and sisters living in Haiti, she grew frantic. Like Jean, it took her nearly four days to hear from her father, who informed her that everyone was safe, but had migrated to a smaller city to escape the overwhelming stench of rotting bodies.

“One of my cousins wasn’t as fortunate as everybody else,” said Alexandre. “A block fell on her head and she died while trying to rescue her daughter — and she died in front of her daughter.”

Nadia Laurent’s entire family lives in the Haitian countryside, but her siblings attend school in Port-au-Prince. “It just so happened that they didn’t have enough money to go to school this month so they stayed home,” she said, “but my brother’s best friend actually died in the quake. They went to the same school together.”

Kassava owner Jean-Claude LaMarre had just returned from Haiti a week before the quake. He lost friends and others are still missing. “Every Haitian that I’ve spoken to on the ground feels displacement, that they are seeing this outside of themselves and are in shock,” he said. “We are talking about human loss on an unimaginable level.”

Since the quake, there have been major L.A. fundraisers hosted by Haitian-Americans at four locations: Kassava; TiGeorges’ Chicken in Echo Park; Full Gospel Apostolic Church of God/La Mission Chretienne D’Haiti; and Afiba Center in South L.A.

TiGeorges’ owner George Laguerre’s restaurant has long been a central gathering place for the local Haitian-American community. For several years, he has held monthly gatherings with Haitian immigrants to provide support and comfort. Following the quake, his restaurant became a site for those who feel they have nowhere else to go to voice their frustration and pain.

Laguerre recently collaborated with various entities — California for Haiti, Sakpase California, Kassava restaurant and Healthy Haiti among them — to conduct a fundraiser through which they were able to raise about $14,000.

Ralph Louissaint, founder of Sakpase California — an organization and Web site committed to promoting Haitian culture — was present during the gathering earlier this month. “They took it very hard,” he said. “The first fundraising we did, you could see it on their faces. … I had never seen so many people, they were coming from everywhere. It was chaos. At 10 o’clock, people were still coming because they wanted to go somewhere to talk about it. We never had anything like this in 200 years.”

Kassava has also opened its doors to the local Haitian-American community, hosting its own fundraiser and gatherings, with meetings focused on how to provide immediate assistance. A committee was formed to keep tabs on both short- and long-range goals, which include rebuilding infrastructure, stabilizing social networks and shoring up emergency response capabilities on the island.

“We realized … we need people on the ground who are committed to the rebuilding effort,” said LaMarre. “When I say that, I don’t mean people who are well intentioned, I mean people who have the ability to actually move things on the ground because what we are finding right now is that you can have Red Cross, you can have UNICEF, you can have all these large nonprofits on the ground but at the same time you have medicine, food and water gridlocked and stuck at the airport. It’s about finding the right people on the ground to actually move the products so they can get to the people.”

Out this tragedy, said Laguerre, some larger truths have come into focus. “The message is that the countries that have money, that are truly the so-called powerful countries, have a responsibility to not allow poor countries in their backyard — because eventually it’s going to be your problem,” he said. “Haiti, for the past 200 years, has been crying for help and everyone who [went] to Haiti never truly provided help, they just put a Band-Aid on it.”

Despite that history, Jean believes the people of Haiti must lead the process of pulling the nation back to its feet.

“Ultimately, Haiti has to be rebuilt by Haitians,” she said. “The international community is getting together and putting together plans for Haiti and it’s a 10-year rebuilding plan. But … it’s our country and we have to have a hand in rebuilding it.”