Finally in Haiti

Greetings from Haiti. We got on the road very early today and made it to Port-au-Prince in about 9 hours. About two of those spent on PaP traffic. There are pedestrians, trucks, mopeds, lots of NGO SUVs on the road. What lacks a lot of the time is the asphalt! The Kia has been having a tough day.

The border crossing at Jimani was much simpler than we expected. Even though we had the mayor's direct phone number, we didn't need his help to get admitted to Haiti. We were actually the only people asking for permission to cross and stamps in our passports. The locals were just going back and forth with tons of supplies on their backs.

We started seeing damage pretty soon after crossing the border. After a few photo stops we arrived at the PaP airport which is where most of the UN teams are based. We hear that sleeping at an airport is not pleasant.

At the airport we met with some Italian GIS guys from the UN. They showed us their work with using satellite imagery to detect damaged buildings. I can tell you that those maps were full of red dots!