Heidi Reed

On January 12, 2010 I sat in my living room in the USA transfixed by the TV and the plumes of dust and smoke I could see rising over Port-au-Prince. The quake had just happened. I had never been to Haiti before and I only knew one person who lived there: Myriam Valme Joseph, the operations manager for Plan Haiti who’d I’d met the previous year while she was visiting Plan USA’s office in Rhode Island. I’d interviewed her for a Plan USA newsletter. And now I worried if Myriam and her family were still alive.

One month after the earthquake, in part because I speak French, I was sent by Plan USA to help out with Plan Haiti’s communications. On my second day, I traveled to Plan’s program unit office in Croix-des-Bouquets, which had been so badly damaged that everyone was working outside under canopy tents, and unexpectedly found Myriam sitting behind a laptop computer wearing her blue Plan T-shirt and matching baseball cap. She was working hard, but she was still very concerned about the well-being of her young daughter, who’d been trapped under the rubble of their house for four hours.

As of February of this year, as Plan Haiti’s new Communications Manager, Myriam is now my colleague at Plan Haiti. She has come to represent what Haiti is all about for me: patient, calm, strong, joyous and fiercely determined to do what is right for Haiti’s future. Haitians like Myriam, for all that they’ve been through, and for all the good they hope will come through better governance and an improved economy, continually inspire me, and that’s why I relocated to this country. It’s the stories of the Haitian people that I hope to bring to life and share through my blogs.