A pair of firefighters on Haiti front lines

Reporting from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti — 

It was early morning in Port-au-Prince, about three weeks after the massive earthquake that laid waste to much of Haiti’s capital, and Jim Clark and Matt Cobb -- a pair of blond-haired, easygoing firefighters from the Bay Area -- were ready to start their day. Dressed in cargo pants and T-shirts, they could have belonged to any one of the emergency aid organizations or news media groups humming around the courtyard of their hotel.

Clark and Cobb, however, belonged to nothing. And that was just fine with them.

The two walked over to the hotel’s tall metal gate and motioned to the armed guard that they needed to get out. In one pocket, Clark had stuffed a wad of $10 bills and, in another, he carried a fold of $20s. Cobb, trained as a medic, wore a small pack around his waist stuffed with a stethoscope and basic medical supplies.

The guard, eyeing them with a look that was part curiosity, part concern, swung open the huge, creaking gate and watched as they set out on foot down the dirt road pitted with small craters and strewn with jagged rocks.

The pair crested a small hill and came across one of the hundreds of makeshift tent encampments that have popped up across the city since the Jan. 12 earthquake. They found a woman sitting on a plastic bucket and holding her left leg aloft. Her ankle, swarming with flies, was badly swollen.

Speaking through an interpreter, the woman said concrete cinder blocks had fallen on her leg as the walls of her house collapsed during the magnitude 7.0 temblor. Cobb told her the bone was almost certainly broken and that she needed to see a doctor. If she wanted, he said, they would return with transportation to a hospital several miles away. The woman, named Islande, agreed with a nod.

Cobb punched the coordinates of the camp into a hand-held GPS mapping device and, dropping the “e,” marked it as “Island camp,” so they would be able to find the woman later. Clark, meanwhile, stood off to the side. He had beckoned several other women in the camp. One by one, he clasped each of their hands in a gentle shake, slipping $20 to them as he did.

“Map tan-ou,” Islande said softly in Creole as the two departed. I will be waiting for you.

An estimated 600 international humanitarian groups descended on Haiti in the weeks after the earthquake. Port-au-Prince and surrounding communities are overflowing with thousands of aid workers seeking to provide food, water, medical treatment and shelter to hundreds of thousands of people. The mammoth operation has been funded with more than $4 billion in donations.

Amid such a large-scale effort -- what one United Nations official referred to as “the relief machine” -- Cobb and Clark were an oddity. Paying their own way, the two captains in Marin Countys Larkspur Fire Department signed up for vacation days, packed a huge duffel bag with medical supplies, and arrived in Haiti with only a need to help and a desire for adventure.

Their 12-day stay was a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation, in which the people they helped were simply the people whose paths they happened to cross.

“We’re not delusional enough to think that we’re going to solve any big problems by coming down here,” Cobb said. “We know what we can offer is a Band-Aid, a little bridge to get someone through for a few days. But we’re touching people’s lives directly. Sometimes, it’s the little victories that matter.”

Clark, a compact, rugged 53-year-old with skin weathered from years on wildfire lines and mountain climbing, recognized the gnawing sensation he felt in the days just after the earthquake as he watched images of the destruction on television. He had felt it before, after the massive tsunami in late 2004 that killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean. He had gone to help then too, he said, ultimately spending two months in Thailand and Indonesia.

There, Clark said, he came to appreciate the contribution that well-organized aid groups make in moments of extreme crisis, but also grew wary of the big egos and outsized expectations that are sometimes on display among relief workers.

Watching the good and bad, he formed a set of rules for himself. Before departing for Haiti, he scribbled them down again in a small notebook: “Be humble. You can’t save the whole world. Don’t promise anything you can’t deliver. The only difference between you and them is where you were born.”

Cobb, 41, burly with a boyish face, had never done anything like this, but was certain he wanted to join Clark. Working his contacts as a medic, he received donations of bandages, IV bags, catheters, rehydration powder and other supplies. Not wanting to be a burden on Haiti’s already tenuous food supply, the men got their bosses to let them take a few dozen expired “meals ready to eat,” which are usually served on fire lines.

They never asked for cash, but when other firefighters and friends heard about their plan, they started dropping by with money. By the time Cobb and Clark departed, they had $7,000 -- about half it their own -- to give away.

Clark said goodbye to his wife, and Cobb to his longtime girlfriend. They flew to the Dominican Republic, where they hired a man with a van to drive them across the border. Their plan to find an open patch of grass to pitch the tents they had packed fell apart when they arrived in Port-au-Prince at dusk Jan. 30.

They encountered a city still mired in chaos and desperation. With hundreds of thousands of people homeless, hungry and thirsty, they feared their supply of food and water would be stolen before sunrise. So they went to the hotel. Both said they felt guilty about staying there, as if they were betraying the suffering Haitian people, and themselves, by sleeping in comfort.

On the first day, they walked for miles through the city, trying to wrap their minds around the scale of the destruction. Then they fell into a routine of mostly wandering through the poor neighborhoods near their hotel that had received little attention from aid groups.

Like strange pied pipers, the men often attracted a gaggle of children, intrigued by the sight of two white men hopscotching over open sewers and sidestepping the gigantic sows lying in piles of garbage along the streets. Some called out playfully after them, Blanc! Blanc!

While Cobb focused on medical attention, treating burns and cleaning wounds, Clark gave away hundreds of dollars a day. He tried to do so discreetly, giving mainly to the elderly and mothers. Though not religious men, they befriended a pastor at a church who was caring for a group of children and gave him a couple hundred dollars. They met a doctor who ran a clinic for the poor and gave him $500 -- enough, the physician told them, to let him treat 200 patients -- and, at the end of their stay, left him the unused medical supplies.

For two days they volunteered at a field hospital run by the University of Miami, where they assisted harried doctors in the pediatric ward, gently turning badly injured children to make their wounds accessible. To entertain one frightened child, Clark inflated a surgical glove and drew a smiley face on it.

“They just dove in and said, Put us to work,’ ” said A.J. Applewhite, a Dallas-based surgeon working at the hospital.

For all the highs, however, there were daily reminders of the serious limits to the help Cobb and Clark could offer. On their last day in Haiti, as they walked to visit a tent camp, a young man approached Cobb in the street.

“There are many people over there who need a lot of help,” he said in broken English, pointing to a nearby neighborhood. “What can you do to help them?”

Cobb asked whether anyone needed medical attention. The man told him there were no injuries. “We need food. We need tents. We need a lot.”

An older woman walked up to Cobb from the other side and started pleading in Creole, resting her hand on his elbow. “She’s asking for a tent too,” the man translated.

Clark had walked ahead. Literally surrounded by need, Cobb exhaled deeply.

“We’re not the U.N. We’re not anybody,” he told the man, who stared at him intently. “We’re just two firefighters from the United States walking around. I have no tents. I have nothing. I have a stethoscope. I can try to tell somebody about you guys, but I’m not sure anybody will listen to me.”

He stopped and an awkward silence hung between the three. The man said something in Creole to the woman and they walked away.

“That has happened a hundred times a day,” Cobb said. “I wish I had something to give them or knew how to get them on whatever list they need to be on for help.”

Neither man denies that part of the reason they went to Haiti was for the sense of adventure that comes with being in the midst of such a historic catastrophe. They saw no contradiction, they said, between that and wanting to help, and emphasized that the survival skills and medical training they have as firefighters made them qualified to make such a trip.

“We keep our egos in check. But, sure, you want to be in the mix,” Clark said. “We’re firefighters. We want to be on the front lines of things.” They cringed at the idea of anyone attempting a similar trip who was incapable of dealing with rough conditions or without the ability to help.

As they had promised Islande, the woman with the apparently broken ankle, Cobb and Clark returned a few hours later. They carried her down the embankment and hoisted her into the back of a pickup truck they had hired for a couple of dollars. As they were about to leave, a boy came running down a dirt path, pushing a wheelbarrow. In it was an elderly man, whose swollen knee was wrapped with green leaves and a dirty bandage.

Cobb jumped down and lifted the man into the truck. Clark banged on the roof and off they went. Another small victory.

joel.rubin@latimes.com