Doug Liman Blog: Haiti Part Deux — Breaking Curfew, Making Pancakes and Trying To Do My Part » 30ninjas

Doug Liman Blog: Haiti Part Deux — Breaking Curfew, Making Pancakes and Trying To Do My Part

Share on Facebook posted 04-16-10 by Doug Liman

Last weekend, taking advantage of a small break in my schedule finishing Fair Game, I returned to Haiti for a few days. I went really to visit the friends I made during my first visit, who have not left since the earthquake, and to see how the people were faring now that the rainy season has started. I was also curious to see what changes may have happened in the country.

A funny thing about Haiti right now is that it’s like volunteering on a political campaign: it’s super social and there are loads of beautiful, interesting women with good hearts. Haiti also seems to have become the place where I socialize with the stars.

I stay with Sean Penn in “camp cool,” — the tennis court I lived on last time. Now the court is covered with a giant tent that used to cover an ice rink in the Dominican Republic. We sleep on army cots inside three man tents arranged in neat rows. Sean has been living in a tent since the earthquake, in conditions not much better than the 65,000 people he is trying to help get back on their feet again.

My plan was to bring down creature comforts for the volunteers including some of my homemade maple syrup and pancake batter to make my friends a home cooked breakfast (normally they eat one meal a day — dinner). So my first morning back, I got up at 5:30a (ahead of the 6 am wake up for the group) and started cooking. Sean sees me and says “Liman, get the hell out of the kitchen, I need you.” “But, I’m not done!” by which I really meant that people were just starting to wake up and not enough of them had seen me flip the pancakes in the air, one of my few physical talents (basically skiing and pancake flipping.)

That day marked the start of Sean doing something truly historic. As I was leaving Haiti, the last time I was there, Sean and his team from JP HRO and Paster Sincere were sitting having coffee at the crack of dawn discussing how they were going to move the families living under tarps on the golf course back into more permanent housing. It was a conversation they were having every morning, and it seemed beyond impossible. And yet today Sean was asking my help because I happened to arrive on day one of the “Movement.”

So needless to say, I put the pancake making aside and ended up extending my stay two more days (which was as long as I could, given the fact that I had to return to NY to finish the movie) volunteering to help load families into the buses, bringing them to their new lives. These people were committing to a one-way ticket and becoming the first inhabitants of what will become a new suburb.

Sean was running this like a military operation. The 6a morning briefing was led by Major Woolrich from the US Army, (assigned to the United Nations and reporting to Sean Penn) and while we didn’t have to salute each other leaving the base was considered going AWOL and was strictly prohibited.

Sean has taken a leadership roll in the coordinating between a dozen NGOs and the Haitian government the moving of 7,000 people whose living conditions were the most unsafe at the golf course to newly assembled homes an hour outside PAP. What Sean had accomplished since my last visit was so extraordinary that President Preval (President of Haiti) appeared in public for the first time since the earthquake. In other words, this was the first good news in Haiti since the earthquake and the President wasn’t gonna let that happen without making an appearance.

The President wasn’t the only one to visit. Shakira came by, Paul Haggis was down in Haiti leading a group that included Ben Stiller (who has been building a school from scratch in Haiti since I think last year), Susan Sarandon (who has also spent time in Haiti before) and new comers to Haiti Gerard Butler, Demi Moore and Olivia Wilde.

I was chatting with Ben, when Sean saw us and said “Doug, don’t you have a bus to be working?” I said: “Next movements not for half-hour, I usually start fifteen minutes out” Sean: “Get back to work!”

Earlier in the day, I had overheard Sean saying to Shakira: “And that’s Doug Liman, who directed Bourne Identity, he’s volunteering down here” and I looked up from my clipboard and was introduced to Shakira. It was clear that the introduction was not an invitation to chat. Sean was communicating a very specific message to his fellow stars: roll up your sleeves, get dirty, get shit done.

So back to work I went.

But it didn’t stop me from violating the curfew and sneaking off the tennis court to go visit Ben and gang over at St Damian Children Hospital, where they were all staying, and where supposedly the Italian doctors were going to be making pizza. Their idea of pizza involves tuna fish and was awful, but the hospital is an incredible success story and is testament to what one person can accomplish. It is the lifelong work of Father Rick. Recently built, the 120-bed hospital has state of the art equipment, top of the line doctors, and is saving children’s lives every single day. It is a literally an oasis in the middle of the poorest city in the Western Hemisphere.

I’m not a religious person (and not at all Catholic), but the Catholic church could help its PR if more people knew about the incredible work being done by people like Father Rick and the group I was working with over on the golf course, Catholic Relief Services (CRS).

I joke about the networking I did while I was there and it is easy to take pot shots at celebrities showing up in places like Port au Prince. But what became abundantly clear to me on this trip is that film people are incredibly good at getting things done in a crisis. When the twin towers collapsed a few blocks from my home in NY, it was film electricians who got in there first to light up the site. Last year, when no one cared about Haiti, that didn’t stop Ben Stiller from building a school in the mountains outside Port au Prince. Film people are used to showing up in difficult environments and accomplishing ambitious goals. If it weren’t for Sean Penn, people would still be sitting around that table having coffee talking about moving families out of harms way — Sean is actually doing it.