RALEIGH -- Last week, Miles Wright was unemployed and complaining to a friend about the unwelcome quiet in his life.
By Friday, he was in a twin-engine plane circling Port-au-Prince's airport in the dark of night, praying for the strength to rescue Bill Nathan, a friend debilitated during Haiti's earthquake.
"There were 100 reasons not to go. All of the hardships, all of the bodies, the access issues," Wright said Wednesday in his Raleigh home. "But there was one simple reason to go: He needed us."
The earthquake knocked Nathan out of an open window from the seventh floor of St. Joseph's Home for Boys in Port-au-Prince, which he directs. The boys who live there had been sent downstairs for evening chores when the quake hit. They managed to run outdoors to safety before St. Joseph's collapsed.
Nathan survived, but his body was bruised and broken. Those scant facts were relayed in a brief telephone call an hour after the earthquake to Hearts with Haiti, a Raleigh-based nonprofit that supports St. Joseph's. Wright, a co-founder of the group, worried that Nathan wouldn't get the care he needed in the devastated nation. The reports from Haiti sounded grim, and Wright vowed to fly there and rescue Nathan.
Wright met Nathan more than a decade ago, a drop in a sea of children who'd found a haven at St. Joseph's. Nathan had been enslaved as a child before escaping and going to St. Joseph's.
Wright doesn't recall the first time they met. Wright, a former journalist who plays guitar in a honky-tonk band and has a long history of nonprofit work, had drifted to Haiti in the 1990s, drawn to its desperate needs, and connected with St. Joseph's. He would later help found Hearts with Haiti to fund the work of St. Joseph's.
Nathan, now 25, lingered at St. Joseph's while other boys grew up and drifted away.
Advice? No thanks
Wright set out for Haiti on Friday against the advice of just about everyone.
Wright's not one to take advice. A hulking Texan, he has a patient face that nods agreement while he devises a work-around. This was a mission for thick skulls, sweet talkers and those with the guts to stare at human suffering and keep walking.
"If you are a problem-solver, you've met your match in Haiti," he said. "The logistical challenges boggle even the most task-oriented, analytical mind."
Barely a plan
Wright's mission was, admittedly, half-baked. Hearts with Haiti hired a pilot with a twin-engine plane. Wright saved two seats for native Haitians who were doctors in the United States. The last seat went to Ben Skinner, a journalist who teaches at Harvard University whom Nathan had nursed through a case of malaria while Skinner was on assignment in Haiti.
On Friday, they loaded the small plane in Fort Lauderdale and headed for Haiti. Their tiny twin-engine circled the airport with C-130s and 777s waiting for clearance to land. It was denied. Wright's team fell silent, each calculating where they could fly with their remaining fuel. Then, for reasons Wright cannot explain, the plane was given permission to land.
On the ground, they found utter chaos.
"No one is in control," Wright said. "It's reporters and soldiers and random aid workers. So we immediately assumed we were in control."
Surrounded by pain
Within hours, Wright and his team found Nathan facedown on a mat in a medical clinic near St. Joseph's. The clinic was a concrete room littered with others nursing broken bones and severed limbs with bandages and pain medicine.
Wright vowed to get Nathan back on the plane come daylight. That night, he found his way to another Hearts with Haiti group home, Wings of Hope, where half the building had collapsed. The children - along with the boys from St. Joseph's - huddled together in two rooms, wiggling like worms on their mats.
"I didn't sleep a wink," Wright said. "Every time I thought I might doze, another child woke up, screaming from a nightmare."
Wright had no idea how he would get a Haitian citizen past U.S. military at the airport. Wright was wearing a Duke T-shirt, the only one he was willing to ruin in Haiti. He heckled the 82nd Airborne Division soldiers, telling them to not let their allegiance to the Tar Heels prevent them from letting him through. Five minutes later, they were allowed to pass.
Paramedics awaited Nathan at the airport in Fort Lauderdale and rushed him to a hospital. They loaded him with pain pills, ordered bed rest and urged him to lie flat.
Wright rented a van and made a makeshift bed in the back for Nathan. He drove to Raleigh, stopping to step into the night's chill every half-hour to keep alert.
Helping from home
Back in Raleigh, Wright paces his home in bare feet, silencing a cell phone that rings constantly.
Nathan slumbers in a guest room down the hall, fading in and out of drug-induced dreams. Wright is playing nurse, popping his head into the room every 30 minutes or so to check on his friend. Nathan is wrecked and tiny in a bed that swallows him. He broke ribs, tore muscle from his vertebrae, banged up his liver and bruised one side of his body so badly it hurts to touch.
Slowly, the horrific sights Wright witnessed and the cries of the children creep into his brain. He pushes them down again and returns another call to another person eager to help the Haitians.
