Raising our family in Vancouver: Michael's Take Off to Haiti this morning

It's been a really busy 48 hours! I finally got to send Michael off this morning with a kiss and he is currently in the air traveling to Fort Lauderdale. He will spend the night tonight in Fort Lauderdale and the head to Haiti tomorrow morning. The hope is that they can land in Port Au Prince, but so far I have not been able to secure a landing spot in Port Au Prince for early tomorrow morning. If I cannot get them a spot they will land in Cape Haitian, normally a 3 hour drive from Port Au Prince, but currently an 8 hour drive with the only option of driving in daylight (meaning if they don't have 8 hours of day light of ahead of them, they don't get to leave Cape Haitian) so we are working around the clock to get them a spot to land in Port Au Prince.

I realize some of you may not know what's going on, so here's a little back ground: I work for a company that works with NGO's. One of those NGO's is Medical Team International. The company I work for is sending the company plane to Haiti with 7 personal on board: 3 orthopedic surgeons, a physical therapist, a company representative, and my husband (serving as an EMT). It's my job to handle the logistics of the flight, communication for the team, and to assist with Medical Teams International with anything that they need. While putting this together on Friday, it grow more and more obvious that they needed someone who had the Michael's skill set and could leave Sunday morning for a week so the team asked Michael to join them and both of us thought it was absolutely something that he could do. MTI currently has 2 teams already on the ground and this team and another team from Seattle will arrive tomorrow making 4 MTI teams serving in Port Au Prince.

Here is Bas explaining the team situation which is currently that everything changes every hour in disaster response. We make decisions with what we know at the time and then change them as needed.