The unreality of an emergency

It is hard to imagine, but we put up our office next to this pool in a Santo Domingo hotel.



From the 'pingpong room', which the hotel converted into an open office space for about 80 people, we manage the transport of aid cargo for most relief agencies into Haiti.



With a 180 degree view of people sitting by the pool, sipping drinks, in one month, we coordinated the offloadeding of 90 cargo planes and a dozen sea vessels. We dispatched 514 trucks from Santo Domingo to Haiti, carrying a total of 1,658 tons of food aid (that is right, 1.6 million kgs) and some 10,000 m³ of other relief goods, from 46 different aid organizations.

As we also run the aid flights from the Dominican Republic into Haiti with four helicopters, two cargo and two passenger planes, we transported 1,650 passengers from 250 different organizations from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince.

The funny thing is that you can't see through the office windows from the outside... So yesterday we had this girl in bikini pacing to and fro in front of the window, talking on her mobile...



It was funny to hear the people in the office on the phone talking about truck dispatches, the offloading of containers, while this little lady was standing with her back against the window...

Ah.. sometimes pleasures can be found in simple things in life...