[airplane engine roaring]
- [cameras click] - [indistinct chatter]
[Jamie] Ladies and gentlemen please take your seats,
we have an amazing show tonight,
you are gonna do something good while feeling good,
we are doing good in the world tonight.
Please make some noise Sean Penn, this beautiful night,
- let's get it going. - [audience clapping]
Oh, come on, loosen it all,
y'all can do better than that, man,
see I know y'all in the 47.5% tax bracket but come on.
The Russians are testing hypersonic nuclear weapons,
impulsive, populous leaders are playing politics
with a global economy while alienating allies
and climatologists give us about 11 years,
before global catastrophic failure.
Lies, greed, rage, sexism, racism,
threaten to induce further violence in our own streets.
Fentanyl and heroin are functioning as rabid assassins,
across the country and meanwhile we here in Hollywood,
we cannibalize each other on social media,
often under the guise of taking a stand,
while too often taking no stand on the ground.
It's my wish for us to get grounded together tonight.
Now, there are cardinal rules in fundraising,
don't bum out the crowd.
[audience laugh]
Let's party.
Family gun dad.
[reporter] The public was fascinated,
by Madonna's turbulent marriage to Sean Penn
and the attention wasn't always welcome.
[reporter] The headlines told a familiar story,
actor in conflict with photographer,
Penn, pleaded no contest, was fined $100
and given a 90-day sentence.
[glass shatters]
What difference you think you can make,
one single man in all this madness?
Thank you for loving me.
[reporter 2] As the UN's inspectors hunt
for weapons of mass destruction and the US threatens war,
to disarm Saddam Hussein quietly and discreetly,
one of Hollywood's hottest actors Sean Penn,
has arrived in Baghdad without an entourage.
[reporter 3] Hollywood's former bad boy,
was welcomed in Baghdad with open arms.
[reporter] Not for a movie
but to visit a Baghdad children's hospital
"saying he is there for a "deeper understanding
"of the crisis with the US,"
Sean Penn, the diplomat, who knew?
This is one big publicity stunt
on the behalf of Sean Penn.
What exactly did Sean Penn expect?
Just showing up in Iraq implies that he's on their side.
There's a fine tradition in this country
of American celebrities making themselves a useful idiots
for anti US dictators.
It is our opinion that Hollywood stars,
who come off as strident and uninformed in political matters
risk hurting their careers if they speak out.
Say what you will about Penn the guy went out in a boat
and actually pulled people to safety,
so, to recap this guy came down four days later,
to mourn the loss of Trent Lott's house,
well, "I am Sam" waited through toxic sludge in a dinghy.
George Kennan and Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice
and George Bush et al should be in fucking jail.
[audience applaud]
You've been an actor since you were very, very young,
have you been committing treason since you were young?
[audience laugh]
[reporter] Penn, has called for the impeachment
of just about everybody in the Bush administration,
Sean Penn you are this week's enemy of the state.
Anti-American Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez
has a brand new American pal,
this time it is actor Sean Penn.
[woman] The criticism could be heard echoing,
throughout Washington.
They lambasted him for allowing himself,
to be paraded around by Chavez as an anti-American puppet.
And the Oscar goes to Sean Penn.
[audience clapping]
I think that it is a good time for those who voted
for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect
and anticipate their great shame
and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes,
we've got to have equal rights for everyone
[audience applaud]
And I wanted to be very clear,
that I do know how hard I make it to appreciate me often.
[audience laugh]
[Don] And A, B, C mark, marker,
place to start is probably January 12th, 2010.
How did you first find out what happened
and I guess get inspired to act?
Well, I had been single parenting my son
for about eight months after divorce with my kid's mother.
In that time period he had a terrible skateboard accident
and had to have emergency brain surgery.
Afterwards he was in enormous pain,
when they put morphine in him and I saw him get relief,
that had sort of been locked in my head.
Now, he had a really extraordinarily fast recovery
just kind of a miracle within a couple of months,
he was 100% and by that time his mother had found a place
and wanted to spend some time with him
and my daughter was already living on her own at that time,
So, I found myself for the first time in 20 years
without kids in the house or a wife.
The first four days of that,
you know, pursued what one might think I would pursue
and in that effort found myself striking out
and instead getting home to this house drunk and exhausted
and passing out and coming to in the morning
and trying it all over again the next day,
that went on for about four days,
when I just realized I'm just too tired
and this is all too new and too much.
The other freedom I now have,
that I'm alone, single in the world
is I can turn the television on in the middle of the day
and nobody's going to gripe at me
and I turned it on and it was the Haiti earthquake.
[glass shattering]
[cars honking]
We're following the breaking news out of Haiti,
the largest, most powerful earthquake
in the region's history has crippled the country,
measuring 7.0.
[reporter 4] Center just West
of densely populated Port-au-Prince,
a city of 2 million people now largely in ruins,
bodies are reportedly stacked in the streets,
schools, hospitals, churches and homes have collapsed.
The first black Republic in the Western hemisphere,
born of a slave uprising Haiti has been the epicenter
of natural and political crisis.
[Obama] For a country and a people,
who are no strangers to hardship and suffering,
this tragedy seems especially cruel and incomprehensible.
[man 2] With hospitals collapsed
and no doctors or ambulances in the streets,
people realized it was up to them.
There's no help, no hospital, no electricity nothing.
[man 3] It's worse than anyone could have imagined.
[man 4] Search and rescue efforts are severely hampered,
food, shelter, water and especially medical care,
all in short supply.
Immediately, the reports I was seeing
were of traumatic injuries that required amputations
and no intravenous pain medication.
I had had some experience in areas of natural disaster,
particular in new Orleans post-Katrina
and what that had taught me
was that you can never get enough help in these situations.
I got in touch with Paul Farmer,
through my first wife Madonna,
who had worked with him in Malawi.
He was in Port-au-Prince trying to help the effort
at university hospital and I asked him what was needed
and he said 350,000 vials of morphine.
And I thought that sounds like a lot of morphine,
the way that I've always joked about it,
is that an actor in Hollywood knows how to find drugs
but not bulk narcotics
but I had done some work in Venezuela,
where I knew that president Chavez,
could expedite something into civilian hands,
unlike in the United States system.
I called president Chavez and I said,
if I get a few guys together
and we go rent some trucks to be a distribution service,
will you send 350,000 bottles of morphine and ketamine?
And he did it.
[helicopter rotors chuffing]
- Holy moly! - Holy moly.
[Paul] We got some supplies here.
[Sean] We went there with the intention
of distributing this for about two weeks
and then hightailing it back to California.
But over the course of the several days that it took,
to organize all the logistics,
medical supplies, food supplies,
we started accumulating other volunteers who wanted to help.
There were a total of 30 of us by the time we went in,
seven of whom were doctors.
Many of you know better than I do what we're about to face,
which is likely total chaos.
When we get into this place,
the first thing that happens is that,
everybody needs you most.
There'll be an immediate attempt to absorb,
particularly doctors, from the time
we get into Port-au-Prince, to the time we have
any semblance of organization,
imagine very little sleep in 48 hours pass.
How long are we prepared to be there?
[Sean] That's an answer everybody has for themself.
Now I have no exit strategy. If anybody needs certainty
on when and how they're getting out of Haiti,
maybe not a good idea to go.
- [plane engine roars] - [upbeat music]
Can't wait to get there that's what is on my mind
and scared also what we're gonna find.
From the moment we landed it was chaotic.
So, right now I'm just offering drives to people,
who wants to get in the car, get in the car now.
[upbeat music]
[Sean] It's kind of like a heavyweight
just punched a lightweight with everything he's got,
that was what that earthquake did to a whole population
for a while there people were just in another place
and then you had the constant the thickness of the air
and that smell of dead bodies is a very particular smell,
and you're traveling over rubble and downed power lines
and the whole city was torn to shreds.
We found a house that was deserted, set up camp there.
This is gonna be our home,
basically this is where everybody's gonna sleep
because it's unsafe to stay under any walls
We were a plan without a plan 'cause we had to go fast
and I had bought 14,000 Chinese water purifiers,
so, we had one volunteer whose job was to get a truck
with a local pastor and go to all the church groups,
that would teach them how to use it
and then spread them to the different villages.
So, one person was doing that
and then we had our medical personnel,
setting up with a medical coordinator, Dr. Raul Reese
and there was Edna Nonez,
former Haitian national police officer,
who was doing some private security work,
then there was captain Barry,
who'd go anywhere do anything, anytime of day,
hysterical, great sense of humor,
he was certainly one of our gold standard guys,
through those first many months.
On the menu this evening, I'll be catering the fair,
we're going to have pasta linguine,
cooked al dente with a Ragu sauce
and garlic bread on the side.
[man 5] How about little wine?
I've heard we had a bottle of wine or two on this location
and for dessert we're gonna have breakfast bars.
[man 5] Okay, great.
[Sean] He was also like an in-house videographer,
I forbade any kind of coverage photography,
by any of our staff with the exception of Captain Barry
because I knew that if people saw me being photographed,
it was gonna add to this idea,
that I was there to self-promote.
Captain Barry was the one guy,
who I trusted a camera in his hand,
that he'd know when to walk away.
So, the lights are gonna go out pretty soon
and the reason why they're gonna go out soon
is we have very little fuel in our generator
but at least we have some lights on
and there is a sense of security here.
[Sean] We got the news that the shipment was gonna come in
from the Venezuelans,
we grabbed one of our trucks to go and pick it all up
and a couple of weapons 'cause we were gonna be carrying
in the back of an open truck, you know morphine.
We're here collecting our distribution,
to bring it back to our doctors
and to the areas that we've targeted that need it.
We got lidocaine, ketamine, IV morphine,
so, that's a lot of people out of pain
in a second and a half.
We didn't have any proper place to store them,
so, I had it all in my tent and it's quite a thing,
to have a tent with hundreds of thousands
of vials of morphine in it.
Watching these amputations happen with saws,
that were taken out of hardware stores or whatever it was,
I mean, virtually civil war medicine stuff,
that was going on.
You're registering faces of human beings,
that have just taken this incredible hit
and they could be like I'm looking at you,
another adult right now
but you can also be looking at a small child
in that situation
and you're of course thinking of your own kids.
Our philosophy was pretty simple,
if a kid's in the middle of the road,
a truck is gonna hit that kid
and you may have a sidewalk full of pedophiles
but you're gonna get that kid and put them on the sidewalk.
You deal with the other problem afterwards
and too many organizations were covering step two,
step three, step four and in an emergency you can't do that,
You have to stop a bleeding
and then deal with whatever the recovery is.
Every day you would notice military helicopters,
going over and landing somewhere close,
to where we were camped,
so, one of the fellas that was with us,
he saw that the US military was up there.
[military man speaking]
[speaking]
That's probably it.
Do you need anything?
[Sean] He came down and said,
wait till you see what's right up here.
[suspenseful music]
[speaking]
[Sean speaking]
There's one golf course in all of Haiti
and a big Stonewall around it, probably those neighborhoods,
which we would associate in the United States
with slum neighborhoods
but they were kind of Haitian middle-class
and most of those people probably never seen the golf course
because there's this big high wall around.
The wall fell down in two parts of it
and it was the only empty green space
for people to go from their collapsed houses,
and 35,000 people were there within days.
Hello.
[Sean] I'm Sean.
I think this is probably a great way to start every day,
just sit here and see average people just like ourselves
and friends back home except in a national disaster,
just knock the shit out of their homes.
They don't have them anymore
and they don't have any money to be able to do anything,
get out of here, everyone here lost somebody
and many are continuing to lose people.
It's not something little, it's too big.
But it's probably the best church to check in with every day,
before we go do what we're trying to do.
The Lieutenant Colonel in command there onsite,
was Lieutenant Colonel, Mike Foster,
he says you can stay here as long as you're productive,
the second you're not productive, you go.
[Barry] Good morning everybody,
- good morning, good morning. - Good morning.
Trying to make base camp.
Sean, I see that you're really busy texting right now.
Oh no, no, you gotta be kidding. I'm not doing...
[Barry] What do you got there?
Got a few extra tents.
Our camp's changing every day, we move things every day.
We're seeing a lot of patients
with the orthopedic injuries, infection, sepsis,
crush injuries. We're seeing actually a lot of tetanus now.
We had the great day today, I feel re-pumped,
we saw about almost 350 patients,
[Barry] Wow, that's the day so far.
The best day so far and tomorrow's gonna be a better day.
[Sean] The federalized doctors,
who are sent to supplement military medics
called DMAT,
they set up a tent hospital and after only a few weeks,
they were going to pull up stakes.
The financing had run out on the DMATs,
you know, they'd done your first responder stuff
and here's this tent hospital with all kinds of equipment
and medications and everything and they were gonna take it.
And you can't. We've got doctors that can run this
and everybody held hands including some of them DMAT doctors
and circled it and refused to let it get pulled up
and Lieutenant Colonel Foster got on the phone with Pentagon
and said, I agree with them.
They ultimately agreed to leave it behind,
that became the JP hospital. We stole it from the government,
[laughs] We stole it basically.
Doctors all took off and our doctors went in,
that became our hospital.
- [nurse] You want to have the line in? - Yes.
We're gonna deliver a baby here,
this is our first day as an operational hospital,
even though we haven't even started
but we're gonna continue to work through the transition.
- First baby. - This is their first baby. Okay.
It was free and it began the top hospital for the camp
and for all the surrounding communities.
People from around the world wanted to help
in Haiti who were identifying us.
Not only individuals, we would get a lot of hospitals
from Canada, the US, doctors or nurses
and they'd come down for a two week stint
and we would rotate one out and then put another one in,
when they left and so on. We had them coming, going,
you know, all the time. Even gunshot victims
and stabbings,
those kinds of things would happen.
A lot of gastrointestinal stuff.
We delivered a lot of babies
and we had a zero maternal mortality rate.
Our hospital was about a hundred meters from my tent,
so, before I'd go to bed, I'd always go and check in,
if the hospital needed anything and you never knew,
you know, what was going on.
The mother was acting very out of sorts,
she must have a psych or post-traumatic stress disorder,
She was feeding the baby and the bottle,
some kind of bleach
but we don't know how much the baby ingested,
The aunt saved the baby's life,
by grabbing it from the mother, it's horrible.
He's got a good pulse can you feel it?
I'll just do it a little bit harder and just take over.
Kinda like that.
We could take people up to a certain degree of care,
we could do minor surgeries
but once you had something that required,
you know, something more sophisticated,
we had to transport them somewhere.
- We got it, Sean, we go it, Sean. - You got one here?
Okay, good luck.
Uh, right now we're in transit
and we might be delivering a baby.
Let's pray that it doesn't happen
in the back of this pickup truck.
It's rush hour now so we hope we get there,
we're driving like a hundred miles an hour,
around the slippery old turn-iest old roads.
She's starting to scream now.
We got security clearing the streets for us.
Oh man, I could hear her voice over all this traffic.
A few more minutes and we'll be there.
So, we got a young guy on a motorcycle ahead of us now,
telling everybody to clear the way. We now have an escort.
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.
[Barry] We got the driver doing a good job.
Great job, great job. You are the man today bro.
I'm trying to show you speedometer but it's broken.
All right this is like home sweet home Saint Damien,
we've been here a couple of times.
Closest main hospital that we got.
Let's go!
[crowd applauding and singing]
[speaking in Creole]
[woman screaming]
[indistinct chatter]
[Raul] But she's one centimeter vertex
and I was told that she was eight centimeters
and she was a breech pregnancy,
so in that regards we put her on the truck
and we came immediately and with a more controlled exam,
that was in this hospital with the appropriate equipment,
that we do not have available in the camp,
this is the information we found and she's gonna be okay.
We improvised a lot,
you know, it was a good thing the first year,
that I had no awareness of Haitian or international law.
[laughs] I just didn't know.
[gentle music]
I was born in Haiti and lived there until I was about 11,
now, I'm here in Kansas,
to direct the institute of Haitian studies.
Sometimes people forget that Haiti has a complex rapport
with the US, with France, with the international community,
Back to becoming the first successful, documented,
slave revolt Haitian fought for their independence,
they are proud of that. The US colonized Haiti,
you know, call it the American occupation,
so, when you go into that space,
acting as if that never happened,
there's that weariness, that lack of trust.
I remember hearing about Sean Penn's being there
and for me, I have very mixed feelings about people,
who go into these spaces,
when they go without talking to people who know the history.
This is what was happening with a lot of well-meaning people.
If you wanna help someone shut up and listen.
[laughs] I mean, it sounds very simplistic
but so many times, well-meaning people,
well-meaning organizations, they don't know how to do that
and it goes back to this idea of power.
Who has power, how is power seen, who has control
and a lot of time, they see it as,
even at a subconscious level,
I am superior than you are, I am here to help you
and by helping what I mean is,
I'm here to tell you what to do
and you need to do things my way.
I don't mean to sound like all aid organization are bad,
there are some organization,
that are doing incredible work in Haiti.
I have a lot of respect for them.
And the difference between this organization
and so many others is that they're working
with people on the ground.
[car engine revving]
[Sean] We got very encouraged,
we could immediately see is effectiveness
but then the young Haitians that saw,
that we were being effective came and became the lead
in the organization, so it became a Haitian born
and formed organization from the beginning.
[speaks Creole]
I don't call J/P HRO, "Sean Penn organization,"
I don't see that,
I see it as us, as our organization as a team.
Faine was... He was a battery.
Like a battery with a smile on it.
And he basically came to the camp
and said he wanted to talk to me.
I came up and this guy says,
you know, "You're helping my country."
"I wanna help you help my country,"
And then I don't think he went to bed for the next year.
[Faine] I was working in Dominican Republic
and four days after the earthquake I come back home
because I've been trying to reach my family on the phone,
I couldn't reach nobody. My mom's house collapsed completely
but no one died, but I have a lot of good friends,
that passed away in that tragedy.
It is very important for us, as Haitians
to put hands together,
to rebuild this country.
[Sean] There was also the young Haitian doctor Jean Marc
and he was saving a lot of people's lives.
I worked for at least six or seven,
different other organizations
and I don't see some of those organizations,
most of them really concerned.
But if I work for six or seven hours for J/P,
it seems like I work for 24 hours, I work so much,
there were so many things to do and we had to do them
and we did it for my people.
Haitian doctors have the will, they have the will
and they do what they can but they have some limits
and when we find what we need, we have no limits.
Believe it.
[helicopter rotors chuffing]
[Sean] I remember I had never seen it from the air
and I had not gotten emotional once.
You know, I saw horrible things
but I had gotten in that head you know, it's fixable.
I can't bring back this life knew that coming in
but this situation, this big picture is fixable
and then the helicopter took off.
Once I got a thousand feet over the city of Port-au-Prince,
the devastation is too big.
I don't know if this can ever, ever heal.
And it tore my guts out to see
because what had looked so fixable big but fixable,
my arrogance was we can fix it. I was humbled immediately
and I guess almost losing faith.
But then you know, we took on our area,
others took on their areas, all those areas come together,
voom.
[upbeat music]
We gotta load it up, we're on the way.
I'm Alvin, from upstate New York, Fort Bragg.
Specialist Bill from Washington, Illinois,
coming out of Fort Bragg.
[Sean] Without question in my experience to date,
the best humanitarian aid organization ever built
is the US military.
They, like those of us who came from movies,
want the mission accomplished yesterday
and make your apologies later.
Sending out MREs 'cause it's safe to leave the camp.
Approximately 2,000 MREs.
They're helping, the 82nd airborne today,
which is making it a lot less chaotic.
This is very common, everything's working out sweet.
They're the ones who told us you watch,
we've got hard deployments in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
These were teams that were already set to head down there,
when this earthquake suddenly had them deployed,
initially 22,000 troops President Obama sent to Haiti.
And they said, "tops we were gonna be here"
"about three months,"
I said, no, no, I couldn't imagine them leaving.
And these guys would say,
yeah, you're gonna end up managing this whole freaking thing
and I'm thinking no,
I mean, you think you're talking to an adult
and the next thing you know, they're gone
and a UN organization made us camp managers.
What was the initial numbers about 35,000 displaced people
had expanded to 60,000 people.
It was the highest density population camp in Port-au-Prince.
Each night the only thing I could say
as I went to bed was, "oh, shit."
[Barry] Good morning everybody, good morning.
What's the deal? Everybody's having coffee and breakfast
and you're out here working what's up with that?
Sometimes it's them while I'm having coffee.
[Barry laughs]
We're all doing the same thing and alternating shifts.
Did you hear about the discovery
of the flesh-eating disease in our water system?
[Barry] No, give me an update.
- Just kidding. - [Barry laughs]
Usually started the day around 6:30 in the morning.
A remodel period!
And we usually wrapped it up about three in the morning.
People were suspicious.
Was I there to you know, pick up a baby and kiss it
in front of a camera and then leave?
What was I doing?
There was the issue that none of the other NGOs,
were living in a camp.
Their organizations paid for nice hotels or apartments
and things like that for all of their foreign staff
and we were living in a camp.
I gotta be honest, I'm always weary about celebrities,
who come to disaster zones
and they usually stay for very short periods of time,
appear before the cameras and then take off
but actor, director Sean Penn
has been here now for almost three weeks,
why have you stay so long?
Because our organization J/P HRO was being so effective.
In a situation like that,
especially early on the first couple of weeks,
you know, it's like all hands on deck,
it's like whatever anybody can do to help anybody
is worthwhile and good and it just surprised me,
that this guy who has just arrived with a desire to help,
where now all of a sudden,
there's tens of thousands of people
and he is caring for them.
It shows you also how, how truly fucked up things were,
you know, if you're thinking to yourself,
huh, who can I get to run a camp
for you know what 50,000 people, 60,000 people in Haiti?
Oh yeah, Sean Penn, that'll be the guy, that'll be it.
You know, you'd be laughed out of the room
but you know what? He did.
What needs to change on the ground now,
what do people in America need to know, what can they do?
I started doing a lot of interviews
with Sean on my broadcast.
He's obviously extraordinarily compelling
but then there's also his ability to get across the urgency
of the situation.
One missionary once said, something to me about,
you know, Haiti, when it gets you, it gets you.
What about Haiti has got you?
You're only flying 90 minutes from your own country
and to land in a world that has been so neglected
with people who have had so little experience
with any of the comforts that we know
and to see their strength of character
and to see this incredible possibility within our reach
in terms of our will to help
and our ability to do what we've shown it already.
We could actually have the example of what happens,
when the developing world is given the productive support,
to become the developed world.
He was able to raise the profile of what was happening
and probably get people interested,
who may not have paid attention to it previously.
So, to people in the States that say,
well, look I gave money it's all still the same
and I shouldn't give any more money.
If you don't trust an NGO, find a family to adopt,
get in touch with our NGO.
You don't have to get us the money,
I'll find you family to adopt I can give you their number,
you can talk to them and find out what it is
but don't stop giving.
Anderson Cooper gave me the mic for kind of calls to action
and to call people out,
I never was ashamed to blackmail organizations,
basically saying, I'll get on Anderson's show
and I'll tell the world that you didn't do this,
and that you're storing these things,
that needed to be distributed whatever.
So much show so that I heard people mimicking me,
you know, mocking me for doing it
in restaurants in Petion-Ville.
Not knowing I was there.
And they could laugh all they wanted
but it would never not work
because the easiest thing in the world
was to get on television and convince people
not to write a check.
I was up at the camp and on my walkie,
I got word from a hospital there was a problem.
A doctor met me outside the tent and said,
this 14 year old had been sick for a couple of days,
thought he had like a fever and he'd get over it.
But he was starting to get a little unresponsive,
Father brought him in. His name was Oriel.
And she diagnosed him with diptheria,
so, I made a couple of calls
and found out there hadn't been any diphtheria
and what are the chances.
They had just gotten hit with an earthquake,
they're going to suddenly get hit with diptheria now?
Come on.
And everybody's telling me no way.
But I thought she knew what she was talking about
and so I said, what do we gotta do?
She says, "This is the medication we need,"
and it turned into a day in hell.
We knew we needed to get him isolated
and in a sterile atmosphere in a hospital,
a proper hospital not a tent.
If she's right, he's dying right now.
We drove from one hospital to another,
getting rejected and the first case rejected
because they refused to acknowledge it was diptheria,
the second one because it was a children's hospital
and he was one year too old and they again also said,
that they don't believe it's diptheria.
Our ambulance breaks down,
one of our other trucks makes its way,
so, now we're in the back of an open pickup truck
with a kid who now can't talk.
I'm holding on to the kid's legs
on the phone keeping him stabilized
and nobody could locate this drug anywhere in the city.
We've been here for three months
and we had the commanding general
of the United States military,
we had the head of the American Red Cross,
we had one of the most important,
television documentary doctors, Dr. Bob Arnot,
all for the last two hours,
searching the entire city of Port-au-Prince,
three months into this for one treatment for diptheria
and we just located it we think.
The CDC are leaving their dinner, paying their bill
and driving down here to get us into the premise,
at nine o'clock at night.
And one of our staff who had gotten the message
and was at a restaurant,
recognized somebody from CDC at another table,
who happened to be the one who knew where it was.
I get a call, "We've got it,"
so, we needed to drop him and go get the medicine.
We forced ourselves into university hospital
and made them take him.
At that point the father connected with us,
he got in the back of the truck with us and we hauled ass.
- 2.5... - 2.5 is the prophylaxis. So it's 20 doses.
We fucking got it and I don't mind saying right now,
that I was so irate that while our guys
were going back to the cold section to get it,
I'm looking around his warehouse there's no cameras
and I start taking everything we'd been needing for months,
I'm like, you know, putting shit under my shirt,
I go back to the cold chain area.
I stole some rabies vaccination
in case one of our people got bit by a--
Like I said... everything at this stage,
you know, I got $30,000 worth of medicine out of there
and they came said, we're ready we jumped in the truck.
[car honks]
[Barry] Where are we at?
General hospital.
We stood there to make sure,
that they put this medicine in this kid
and I saw that medicine go in there and I said yes,
you know, it was fucking thrilling.
[Barry] If something happens to that kid,
I'll be like fucking pissed.
It's three months and a warehouse has the medicine
and this is the biggest hospital in the biggest city
of a country that had the worst humanitarian disaster
of all time and nobody bothered to come down here
and tell the administration where they can find the medicine
much less give it to them in case it happened.
We get back up to our camp and you know, there was some rum.
- Cheers everyone, cheers. - Cheers to Haiti.
[All] Cheers to Haiti.
And I had that first rum punch thinking,
oh, we saved a life today, I mean like tangible.
We got up to the news he'd died,
and that was...
I remember being in the truck...
And this is the father.
...on the way back to the hospital with the medication
and looking into that father's eyes
and telling him we got it. Your son's gonna live.
Thank you very much for your help because I have my son.
You know, I don't have the possibility to go to the hospice.
You know, I come to the camp,
I saw that you give me your help
and God bless you and your family,
to give your power to give me my son,
you know, I like my son, I love my son,
you know, I thank you very much.
That was a bad day.
Now, imagine that you're not under this beautiful tent
but you're sitting down there in the tarp,
I could cry every time.
This is where the next major catastrophe,
is when it begins right now, phase two.
[Sean] The UN had determined,
that our camp had the highest life threat,
relative to mudslide or flooding,
so, we were gonna have to organize voluntary relocation.
And the first wave of relocation to save lives,
we cumulatively need to decompress the camp by 7,500 persons.
The idea was a planned camp,
where you have a certain amount of space between tents
if this person cooking outside with their oil,
you know, lights their tent on fire,
it's not gonna catch this one on fire,
you're not gonna spread disease as much,
you're gonna have all this kind of stuff.
This is before there were any plans or resources,
to actually rebuild the city, permanent housing, or anything.
It's emergency relocation.
They need to start loading their stuff,
at least an hour before.
[Sean] We figured out a system.
They come for check-in, we tag them stuff,
we set them up at the gate,
we have a lot of people come in.
[Sean] It's very important that you didn't
separate families.
That you didn't have kids taken by somebody,
they weren't supposed to be with
once they started getting on the buses.
[man 6] After the earthquake,
I seen a lot of people traumatized and I said,
let me come up by the camp see how people do
and J/P was just starting to function.
The earthquake affected everybody,
the poor, the rich, white, black, whatever.
We will learn a lesson from that so in the near future,
if something like that occurred again,
everything could be done in a way that,
we'd be able to the help one another out.
It's like love one another you know what I mean?
[car engine roars]
[Barry] What did you write there?
New beginnings.
[car engine roars]
[helicopter rotors chuffing]
[Sean] The relocation camp was a piece of land chosen
by the Haitian government.
It was right at the foot of the hills
on the outside of Port-au-Prince.
For some reason, somebody had it in their heads
that they wanted it to have gravel laid out over it
before the camp was built,
which was very odd because it was a pale gravel,
and it reflected the sunlight a lot.
And there were no trees out there at all,
and it was part of the bigger problem in Haiti,
the deforestation.
And it was also in a kind of a bad flood plain,
but it was what was available,
and we had what was a very successful relocation.
Then it became very controversial.
[reporter 5] In Corail the government's
primary relocation camps, some 15 miles from Port-au-Prince,
a storm on Monday collapsed at least 94 tents
and sent hundreds of residents fleeing to find shelter.
[Sean] I went straight out there
because I was hearing hell raising is going on,
and I could see the tires were burning across the city
which is a sign of social unrest.
And hell yeah, people were upset, but I went tent to tent
and asked them if they wanted to come back,
and nobody wanted to come back.
They wanted to stay there but they were pissed off
and they wanted help rebuilding these tents.
[plane engine roaring]
What's amazing now is that turned into its own city.
An area that had almost no population
has got about 250,000 people.
- [woman singing in Creole] - [indistinct chatter]
We did a census in our camp,
where did these people come from?
Almost everybody came from one neighborhood
which was the one that had the access
through the break in the wall, Delmas 32.
So we went and did a site visit down that community.
Virtually, Delmas had overhead rubble covering the streets
for miles.
Am I exaggerating? Miles of just rubble.
This corner was just like a bar. People stayed here
late at night, having fun here.
There was a TV here, there was water here.
This corner there was a cement all the way down there
but most of the people in the area we used to hang out here.
So this was like the town square.
Exactly.
[car engine roars]
I said, I wanna clear this rubble.
We have to be very, very clear.
[Sean] And so we started an engineering Corps.
Got a civil engineer, a former military engineer,
from the British forces.
And the truck was being loaded here. Yeah?
[Sean] And a country director, also a Brit,
also former military.
They developed a rubble removal plan.
And this fella up in Seattle, Richard Hots,
who had a company called Alaska structures,
every tent the US military puts up on any branch
in the military, around the world,
almost all of them come from Alaska Structures.
So this was a guy who started camping tent business
and became a very wealthy philanthropist.
Agreed with me politically on not one thing ever.
You're the first person I've seen really get on the ground
and stay on the ground.
[Sean] But he saw me on the Anderson Cooper show
and he saw that we agreed on Haiti.
He came in and gave us our first rubble removal grant
of a quarter of a million dollars.
Today, you find us at Rue Petion in Delmas 32
which is our primary rubble removal site.
You can see the CAT behind me operating
and we have two of them operating at the moment
and they can move 140 cubic meters of rubble a day.
We have a team of Haitian and international volunteers
running it, but with one of these,
we clear 140 cubic meters a day
and we have 200,000 cubic meters to clear.
[Sean] We became the principal in that area,
and there were bodies in that rubble
and that was another sensitive issue, at a certain point.
You don't have the sophisticated stuff or the money
or the time to surgically take care
and do a forensic on this thing for the family.
So you have to go to the family and say,
"Do you have a loved one in that house?"
You know 'cause this is now months later.
There's no search and rescue going on at this point,
all there's gonna be is bones.
And so when you were doing a rubble removal on a site
where there was likely a body, the community leaders agreed
that the way they would do it, you let the family come,
they pour little gasoline through the fissures and light it.
[singing in Creole]
That's not an easy life for those men and women
that work in those teams because you take it home.
During the earthquake, the front of this actually killed
a number of individuals who were running down this corridor
to escape from the inside of this area.
As you can see right here, this wall is,
it's just kinda, it's just there.
It's a recipe for a very dangerous situation.
When it's a dangerous house, we'll put caution tape
and then we keep people away from passing.
So we never know when things can happen.
[Jeff] This is a property
that we've been doing demolition on,
it was a three-story property
and right now we're on the first floor
which actually was the second floor.
The property collapsed crushing the first floor
and now it's just a matter of bringing the rubble
from inside the property, out to the street.
When you see the devastation that this earthquake
has caused this country, and when you see the degradation
of just about everything that you can think of,
what people have lost in a matter of seconds,
and here you are fortunate enough to be able to help,
and if you come and do it, you're not doing it
with your heart, man, you know what I'm saying,
there's nothing that you will be able to do.
[Sean] As soon as that rubble was cleared
in various sections, people started moving back on their own
to the houses that were not destroyed,
or moving back and setting up a tent on their old property.
Businesses started cropping up on the street again
and you felt this vibrancy building up
that they were doing on their own without any help.
So we took what had been our camp services
and lessons learned and transferred them to the area
that these camp residence came from,
and it was in that step-by-step way,
we would get people starting to get out of the camp.
[indistinct chatter]
So you can see, you can follow me.
All this, this is our prenatal section.
All the women, they stay here and wait.
Once their vital sign is done here, this is this Desiah.
- Desiah say hello. - Hello.
Desiah is one of our newly graduated EMT.
He was in the EMT program.
I was born in Delmas and then my father passed away
and my mom couldn't stay here any longer,
so she decided we should move to New York for a better life.
I assimilated to the American culture, went to nice schools,
I got a great education, had a fantastic job
at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
for many, many years and then I got married,
had three kids and had the American dream.
And then a friend of mine called me.
It was on January 12th, around like 4:55,
check CNN, the end of the world is happening in Haiti.
You could hear the screaming.
This cry was different, it was like painful cries.
Right then, then I said, I'm moving back to Haiti.
Our prenatal clinic is right here.
We see all the pregnant women from the beginning
of a positive pregnancy test, all the way until they deliver.
We do all their care for them free of charge.
We have over a thousand babies born, no death.
Thank God. So far, knock on wood.
We started with her 30 international volunteers,
now we have more than 100 Haitian medical professionals
providing quality care.
If we weren't there, I guarantee you a lot of patients
would have died from preventable and treatable illnesses.
[car engine roars]
[indistinct chatter]
[Sean] For who don't know in that first year,
7,000 people died an hour and a half from Miami beach
of a disease you cannot die from here.
If you get cholera and you don't treat it in time
you're gonna die, period.
It takes all the water out of your body.
15 boxes of ORS.
[Sean] We ended up getting a warehouse down Cite Solei
and got a hundred thousand units of Ringer's lactate
and supplies.
Right now they're loading the tents that are gonna
be used to create the cholera treatment centers.
Self-contained units so that the patients are isolated
and can be treated specifically for cholera.
[Sean] And we were starting to track the breakouts.
Coordinating with the cellular phone companies.
You could track migrations,
so you could see that large amounts people
were moving away from an area,
and you knew immediately that that area had cholera.
So we started working with the Cuban doctors
'cause they had a brigade there and they had donkeys,
so they could go up in the areas that we couldn't get to.
And then we had the elections coming up
and when elections come up, traditionally,
you get social unrest.
The last thing in the world that we needed was gun battles
in the streets while people were dying of cholera
and while they had no hard shelter, they're in camps.
Everybody's in camps.
We cannot rule out the possibility of violence in our camp.
For the next 48 hours, I would request that
no one enter the camp unless it's absolutely necessary
to your job.
So now we started paying for helicopters
and then mixing that with working with
the UN humanitarian air service,
and that way we could, by air, bring our doctors
and the medication out to all these hotspots
throughout the country.
- [gentle music] - [plane engine roars]
[speaking in Creole]
I never believed something like this could happen
in my country.
I feel so low, I feel so down.
It's too much.
It's too much. [sighs heavily]
[plane engine roars]
You know I think in one year we might've spent
as much as $25 million, but that's when you were
in the emergency phase and big grants were coming in.
So that was, you know, then.
As time went on, I had to pay for all that stuff
with private money.
So then we had to do the gala.
- [camera clicks] - [reporters shout indistinctly]
Tonight we're here to celebrate Sean Penn and J/P HRO
and the great work they've been doing for Haiti.
With such star names helping Haiti.
These events are key to Haiti's recovery.
[Sean] It's the worst part of it.
It's the thing that'll burn you out
faster than anything else.
The hat in handness of it.
We're ready to rock and we need you badly.
You know, it's always a struggle of calling friends
and enemies [audience laughs]
and telling them they're your friends.
- [Sean laughs] - [audience laughs]
You're just begging because the people there
are working so hard and heroically.
We've had extraordinary people help us in two ways.
One of those, you know, you'll have an art auction
and who are willing to pony up big bids
to help out the organization.
The artists who contribute the art,
then we have musical guests.
And the musical guests have been the greatest bands
in the world, really extraordinary.
So you have to work very hard to make sure
that it's a good night for them.
You want that.
And so there's that pressure.
And then there's the pressure of how much are you gonna pull.
Who's gonna start any number you can do in this room.
Let's just start adding it up.
Everybody in here can vote for the future.
Just give me a number 5,000, 10,000, 20,000.
Just give me a number. Who?
You've got 300 people in a room. By the end of that night,
if you make $6 million out of those 300 people
it's probably coming out of five pockets.
And you're looking around the room wondering,
if you're here in Beverly Hills,
and you're watching this entertainment,
you're watching YouTube and they're pouring their hearts out
you don't have $500 to donate? [laughs]
And I know a lot of people in that room,
they have a lot more than $500 to donate,
and they come year after year to these things
and never put up anything, and it's pretty infuriating.
Okay, I'm just gonna really look around this room.
Come on, man.
These people are dying over there, we need your help,
I've already given millions of dollars, it's time.
I've gotten worse and worse at it.
I quit every year.
Quite frankly, the bottom line is, they're waiting now,
young brains are starving for education now,
there's malnutrition now as we're sitting here tonight
and I trust that you don't need me to be very charming
to tell you that what we've got to do is raise
a lot of money tonight.
Everybody in this room,
every one of you can contribute to this.
And you know, you know from the people who were up here,
I'm not fucking around.
We're gonna make your money work, give us that money.
We need the goddamn money.
We need the support now.
[sighs heavily] Help us finish this job.
Reach deep, then reach deeper.
We share one second on Earth together.
Let's do it right.
I know these evenings can be long, but trust me.
And then there's the people who are so supportive,
and you can get champions in a lot of corners,
people who contribute in a lot of ways to it.
-Sold to--[audience claps]
But it's a beast.
We're constantly looking for new ways to sustain things.
If there's one true lesson that I myself have learned
from Haitians is that if you are shoved down to the ground
wounded, hurt really bad, there's only one thing to do,
get back up.
[audience clap]
The rubble is mostly gone.
Sean's organization, cleaned 500,000 cubic meters.
He has carried off one of the most successful
camp evacuations ever.
60,000 people moved from camp.
[audience claps]
- [gentle music] - [thunder rumbles]
[Sean] I remember I walked down the hill
and I see this incredible space,
this golf course that they talked about.
I never understood how it could have been a golf course.
It seemed like too much of a hill,
but all of a sudden, now the tents are all clear
and I'm seeing it.
And I see it for the first time.
I went back to that first day in my head
and remembering all those nights and the screaming
and the, sometimes the violence and sometimes the party.
All the stuff that life is that that camp had represented.
And those original volunteers
that had long since gone away.
All the experiences that had been that camp.
There were people who told us you'll never get it done,
all that but, that was big day.
Really, really big day.
There came a time when you move from emergency relief
into development where yours truly has to fire himself
because making movies and emergencies are the same thing,
the stakes are different, but when it came to development
you needed much more knowledgeable, thoughtful
and patient people than myself running it.
[Don] Roll sound.
Sound speeds.
Okay, good to go.
I remember after the earthquake, when we were going
to all these meetings,
I was called on by the US government to talk to Sean
because he was managing the biggest displacement camp.
And I think they were concerned about him
having enough support and experience
and kind of help guide him on ways that looking at the camp.
Sean was saying, you know how he was worried
about the drainage because it was very hilly,
and because of the rains there was a lot of issues
with the tents getting flooded.
My boss very quickly volunteered my team
to provide the heavy equipment, to help with the drainage.
Which was very frustrating because at the time
I did not take him seriously.
I did not think he was gonna stay for very long.
I just figured he's going to take pictures,
he's gonna do his thing and then he's gonna leave
because that's what we had been seeing of other people.
There is this natural competition between organizations
that is so toxic.
And I think it was just realizing that,
wait a second we're all trying to do the same thing,
and if we don't work together then what the fuck am I doing?
He was actually committed.
He was actually like on the ground doing stuff.
That changed my attitude towards him.
And then in 2015, Sean asked me to join the organization.
I gave it maybe a week's thought and quit my job at the UN
and jumped right on board.
And the first thing that I did was to go with him
to COP 21 in France.
[gentle music]
Sean met with the French president.
They discussed what the biggest difficulties were
in Haiti and reforestation and climate change
were the two biggest things that they decided
were critically important to address.
And the French president said, "I'm gonna work with you."
"We're gonna allocate, millions of dollars"
"towards reforestation."
We have a ten-year plan to mobilize
a civilian conservation Corps,
to incentivize the protection of trees by the resourcing
of agriculture.
When we presented this to the French government
we presented it as a dream, but we were greeted
with a relative acknowledgement
that it's no longer time for dreaming.
With an initial plan of a pledge from France
of a hundred million dollars over 10 years
matched by the World Bank, another hundred million
over 10 years and then private funds,
we have Haiti Takes Root,
which is a massive reforestation project.
We are here tonight with you and by with you, I mean
with your commitment, we share it to make this happen.
[Ann] Now, translating that vision into reality
on the ground, however, is a very different thing.
We've spent about $2 million over the last two years
on getting actual physical activities on the ground.
But we are the only ones who've been spending money
because World Bank is not allowed to spend money
except through the Haitian government.
Given the political situation in Haiti
that has been very difficult.
[TV reporter] Protesters running from tear gas...
[gun shots]
...clashes with police, barricades and fires.
These are the scenes of anger
paralyzing Haiti's largest cities after more than a week
of deadly unrest.
The demonstrators are demanding
their president's resignation.
Many people are very discouraged especially
if they in Port-au-Prince.
Haiti exists.
People exist, people or in their community
they are surviving in spite of the government,
not because of the government.
In many ways we are going backwards,
instead of moving forward.
It's super frustrating, but having worked, jeez,
14 years in Haiti, it's also not surprising, unfortunately.
So we're gonna continue on working with the farmers,
to grow more productive trees
and increase their wages, their earnings
but Haiti Takes Root as imagined is on hold for now.
This organization's lifeblood is this gala.
We're trying to change that, but for right now
it's very reliant on this gala for funding.
It's what separates us out from
the majority of organizations out there.
Welcome to the 5th annual Help Haiti event.
[Ann] When we have flexible funding
and we can spend it in ways that most organizations can't,
it just means that we can get work done on the ground
a lot quicker.
[TV reporter] Hurricane Matthew slammed into Haiti
on Tuesday only now are we starting to see the extent
of the damage.
And while the Capital city largely dodged a bullet
there are some rural areas here that are just
absolutely devastated and fears remain for flooding,
mudslides and possibly cholera.
When hurricane Matthew happened, we already
had our programs planned,
but philosophically, we must respond.
[Ann] Our team who had experience from the earthquake
jumped right in and went into disaster response mode.
To be able to even get medical, food,
any of those things anywhere you need to have access.
So we did that immediately.
[woman speaks Creole]
You get to know the community and you can see
what else is needed, and they tell us,
okay we need money for this now,
and we need to do this next.
Our teams were all Haitian and the local mayors
were saying you have no idea how good it feels
to see one of our own responding, speaking our language,
and it's amazing to see that we're able to do this
for ourselves.
Haitians aren't just victims.
They're not just like helpless people
that need help all the time, they're bad-ass.
Food, water, all those things are necessary.
That's short-term stuff
but let's start investing immediately now
on things that are going to prevent the next hurricane
to completely knock out these communities.
So we had a $7 million annual budget
and we had raised $7 million.
And within five weeks we spent $3 million responding
to Matthew.
That was an unforeseen cost.
[Don] Does that make you wanna think about
scaling back or you keep pushing forward?
Well, what I wanna to do
is I don't wanna leave anybody high and dry,
including our employees,
and in the education area, certainly not kids.
So we're just going to figure out a way to keep it financed
as long as we have it.
If I can offload education onto
another philanthropic organization
that we share a philosophy with who will either improve it
or at least maintain it as it is, I'll do that.
What I would like to be left with is what we started with
because the storms aren't gonna get less.
We're a humanitarian emergency organization,
and to bring that outside of Haiti is valuable.
When you look at the hurricane belt of the United States
it's not rocket science to know where
a lot of these disasters are gonna hit.
It's basically the convergence of poverty, racial inequality
and riskier areas that are more prone to the elements.
What we're starting now is our first pilot project
in Savannah, Georgia.
[indistinct chatter]
What we do is we go to disadvantaged neighborhoods
and areas that have serious racial tension
between the police and the residents.
And you get the young men and women from 16 to 25 years old
and start training them.
Today is graduation day for our community emergency
response team program training.
I'm really excited.
[Sean] And working with the governor and the universities.
Make it so that those credits matter as university credits.
That the cert training is a certification that matters,
that it has a presence on a CV in getting a job.
Well, I think my classmates are pretty proud
and excited that we get to have this opportunity
to all be together and accomplish something.
For me to graduate out of this program
to give me the opportunities that it's giving me,
it's a good feeling.
It means a lot to me to help other people,
and to know that I can.
[Sean] If you have six locations from Houston
to the Southern Atlantic seaboard,
you've got the entire hurricane belt covered
with trained young people.
[Trainee] Hands on the wall, hands on the wall.
[Sean] And then if the emergency happens
within say 250 miles, they are obligated to deploy
to that area also.
First to their own community,
but if it doesn't hit their community
then they can be activated for other areas.
[TV reporter 1] Florence raging ashore before dawn.
Hurricane-force winds turning debris into projectiles.
[TV reporter 2] Fierce winds and relentless waves
bearing down on the Carolinas.
We knew hurricane Florence is gonna hit Robertson County
'cause it's the poorest county,
and it was in an area where there this massive river
that flooded all the time.
We brought about 15 kids and they spent a long weekend
just mucking out these houses of families
that had water halfway up their walls.
Thanks for coming in this is absolutely huge
to have you all involved.
Couldn't be more thankful that you're here
and let's get to work.
[Ann] Those kids worked in the North Carolina heat
but we're just so happy and excited to be doing something
and to put their training to use.
They actually saw the impact that they had on these families
who were so grateful who would come by and bring them water
and just inspire them.
One, two, three cheese.
I felt a long time ago that J/P HRO
is a name that only Haitians and people in Haiti
can actually remember, nobody ever gets it right.
Also in terms of the direction we were going
we changed J/P HRO into CORE.
It's Community Organized Relief Effort.
[thunder rumbling]
[TV reporter 3] We wanna get right to hurricane Dorian
category five storm hitting, The Bahamas,
heading for the Southeast.
Wind gusts of 200 miles per hour.
You can see what it's doing here and off in the distance,
those waves crashing against the pier.
[wind gusts]
[Ann] The Bahamas happens.
We have a relationship with the mayor of San Juan,
where she sends out with us, her team of search and rescue
and medical staff to respond to an emergency.
So as soon as the medical teams were done
then our teams brought in the debris removal.
While we're doing that, we have a team that's getting
businesses back up and running again, as well as households
get cash to people so that they can rebuild their lives.
We're not a massively huge organization,
we have a lot of heart.
But here's the vision we're gonna make this community
healthier, stronger, and happier.
And we got to sell that to other organizations
to inspire them, to just throw in what they can.
[gentle music]
After so many years, you just get numb to it.
You know, the same images, you see all the destruction,
you hear the same stories, you remember what you remember.
I think this one, because it's 10 years, hit me a lot harder
than it does usually.
Remembering the people that you've left behind
and the life that you left behind.
I see a lot of personality driven organizations
that start out with big ideas
and a lot of energy for fundraising
that gets real tiring real quick,
and you'll see those organizations close their doors.
We've been trying to alleviate some of that pressure
from Sean.
He opens doors for us, for sure.
He is not as much a deal closer anymore.
There's this story that I've loved ever since I was a kid.
And it's about this guy who comes into a village
and he's a vagabond,
and this village is very, very suspicious.
Everyone runs into their houses and closes their door
and he sets up in the center of the village,
he pulls out his stone and his pot
and he starts building a fire,
filling his pot up with water, sticks a stone in,
and he's just cooking away.
The villages are very curious,
so they're coming out one by one and they're asking him,
"What are you making? What is that?"
"And he says, " This is the most delicious soup
"that you will ever taste. It is so hardy.
"You will never taste anything like it"
"but it would just be even better if we could add"
"a few more carrots in there."
The villager says, "I have carrots, I'll bring some."
And then another villager comes and he says,
"Oh it'd be so much better if we just had onions."
And so at the end of it, the vagabond actually makes
the most delicious soup ever tasted.
To me, that is Sean.
He comes in with a fucking bag and a fucking rock
and is like, "This is the most amazing thing"
"we're gonna do ever."
And little by little people make it happen.
[indistinct chatter]
[Sean] I'm just a guy who says,
"Okay, I think I can do this."
"I think I can do something good here."
I don't fancy myself,
a good doer or a bad doer. Like here's a project,
and I keep my head in there
'cause I have great humanitarians that I work with.
Five times a month, I say to myself out loud,
thank God that I went.
The life experience of it,
the people that I met, both Haitian and non Haitian,
the things I learned about
that I never would have understood.
I wouldn't miss this for my life for anything.
There were so many people whose names I won't remember
without whom J/P HR would not exist.
Maybe tomorrow I'll flash on a face and go,
"Oh, what was her name? What was his name?"
They might've just done one thing on one day
that changed everything because we were an airplane
that built itself after takeoff.
And that's a perilous ride in so many ways.
And how it ended up surviving was the force of will
of hundreds of people.
We need citizen activism.
We need citizen participation.
And that's all I can claim to be, is as a citizen
who tries to participate and that's it.
[woman] Do you have your glasses Sean?
I used to say about directing a film
that at a certain point, you're running down a train track
and now you're in a tunnel and the trains coming
and you only have one choice, you gotta keep running.
There's no room on the sides, right?
For me, there were two daylights.
There was the daylight came after about nine months
which was a daylight enough that said,
"I've got people here I can trust to keep this going,"
and then there's that most distant daylight
which is how to really feel that we made a lasting impact
on people's lives.
[Don] You're optimistic?
Well I have no choice, there's no choice.
I've told too many people it's gonna work.
[laughs] I'm in the tunnel.
[Host] And now the founder of CORE, Sean Penn.
[audience applaud]
♪ It's part of the attraction ♪
♪ You wanna be destroyed ♪
♪ And the spirit on the water ♪
♪ And you're the farmer's boy ♪
♪ When I heard your voice ♪
♪ At first I was annoyed ♪
♪ You woke me ♪
♪ From the beginning of time ♪
♪ I had so little grace ♪
♪ After while not a freckle on your face ♪
♪ I was looking for the rhyme in time and space ♪
♪ And you broke me ♪
♪ You are walking now naked with your pants not on ♪
♪ At the gates of Eden with no sins to pardon ♪
♪ It was Adam not Eve who threw God out of the garden ♪
♪ You rock me ♪
♪ Let's not get clever with this stuff ♪
♪ Well are you ready to give up ♪
♪ To find love ♪
♪ When you're climbing rom the wreckage of a burnout star ♪
♪ And the old neon looks like the counting bar ♪
♪ Asked where I was going ♪
♪ I answered how far you wanna go ♪
♪ American male, teary-eyed knight ♪
♪ The cigarette smokers going to find his light ♪
♪ If you repeat it often enough ♪
♪ Wrong looks right ♪
♪ But deep down you know ♪
♪ The smooth will make excuses for the rough ♪
♪ Yeah, no, it shouldn't be this tough ♪
♪ To find love ♪
♪ Tell the oceans ♪
♪ Tell the sun ♪
♪ Tell the weatherman ♪
♪ Tell everyone ♪
♪ All money junkies are running out of veins ♪
♪ If you're one of them yourself ♪
♪ You got no one else to blame ♪
♪ You don't need any more than you have ♪
♪ Except the shame of feeling torn ♪
♪ Between the hungry and the greedy ♪
♪ The hunted and the needy ♪
♪ If you wanted you can see me ♪
♪ When you serve the poor you free me ♪
♪ Slaves have grown accustomed to the weight of your chains ♪
♪ And your heads shone ♪
♪ Your eyes will find the silence inside the hurricane ♪
♪ You know you must do something other than complain ♪
♪ Or pray for mother Earth, these are not more labor pains ♪
♪ Maybe you're being born ♪
♪ Out of the ash of the dust ♪
♪ The clever learn who not to trust ♪
♪ The genius of belief is that we must ♪
♪ Take a chance sometimes on us ♪
♪ To find love ♪