15852: (Hermantin) Miami-Herald-Students taking bus full of goods to Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Thu, Jun. 12, 2003

Students taking bus full of goods to Haiti
BY NICHOLAS SPANGLER AND TRENTON DANIEL
nspangler@herald.com



A stream of pickup trucks and compact cars packed full of any number of
goods ran into the Sea-Linkton shipping yard on the east bank of the Miami
River on Wednesday. Cargo cranes groaned through their business and more
trucks lined up on the road outside.

''Nou rapid, nou serve, nou gen eksperyans,'' read a sign on the office wall
-- ``We have rapid service, we have experience.''

Freighters leave this yard every week bound for Haiti, floating low with
sundry cargo of battered vehicles, staple foods, bicycles and bed frames and
bales of pp, used clothing from America to be worn on Haitian backs.

Amid all this there was a giant lime-green bus stacked with computers, pinto
beans, children's medicine, 600 pounds of dried goods and 6,000 books in
Creole.

Three information technologists drove it down from Ann Arbor, Mich., this
week. They drove in shifts down the 1,500-mile length of Interstate 75 and
arrived at 3 a.m. Tuesday, after three days on the road.

The three technologists -- Sara Naab, Sadanori Horiguchi and Junko Sagawa,
all graduate students at the University of Michigan's School of Information
-- napped and did some sunbathing in Miami Beach that day. Wednesday they
settled up with the shipping company.

The computers are bound for a computer training center Naab, 22, started
last year in the Haitian coastal city of Les Cayes. The books -- fiction,
anthropology, geography and religion -- will go to a community library in
that city.

They are bound for a place where power outages can bring a computer network
to its knees, where the literacy rate is not quite half. They will do some
good there, maybe, that could not otherwise be done.

''American people can't do everything for me,'' Israel Izidor, the pastor
who supervises the computer center, said by phone from Les Cayes. ``But they
can help.''

First the technologists had to pay their shipping bill. So they sat for a
time in the waiting room of the Sea-Linkton company Wednesday afternoon with
women in head scarves and men in suits or blue jeans, fellow customers. Naab
chatted companionably in Creole with an astonished man standing next to her.

The bill was $3,600, $100 per foot for the big green bus. The technologists
walked out into the shipping yard. Hundreds of stuffed vehicles were parked
in rows, waiting to make the voyage. A giant freighter was being loaded
riverside. The bow swung up on hinges and yawned open.

''It's almost as if the ship is vomiting when you see these unloading,''
Horiguchi said, happily.

They led the way to the bus, which they got at fire-sale prices a few months
ago from the Chelsea, Mich., school board. The seats in the front half had
been ripped out; a sleeping pad and a microwave were on the floor. Computers
and books and beans were stacked to the ceiling in the back.

The technologists' friends had graffitied the walls. ''Dance like no one is
watching,'' somebody had written.

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