Chance Meeting Helps Students Transport Goods to Haiti

Emma Lipner has half a ton of medical supplies for Haiti piled up in her living room, and thanks to some chance encounters and quick corporate action, she knows how to get it to the earthquake-ravaged country.

Lipner, a senior at Shalhevet high school, was part of a school-wide effort to collect medical supplies to send to St. Damien, the only hospital left standing in Port-au-Prince. The supplies were intended to be transported on a private jet carrying relief workers to Haiti, but the jet left early, stranding the supplies, including crutches, bandages, medications and surgical supplies collected from doctors, pharmacists and medical supply companies.

Meanwhile, Dave Chameides, a filmmaker and the school’s director of sustainability, who spearheaded the project, was called to Haiti to work on a documentary film. Before he left, he told Lipner to keep collecting, and they’d figure out how to get the supplies over.
En route to Haiti, Chameides was schmoozing with a Virgin America flight attendant and mentioned the stalled project.

“I’ll be right back,” the attendant told him. Even before the flight landed, Chameides received an e-mail from Douglas Stolls, a guest services specialist at Virgin America, saying he would take care of things.

Virgin America already had shipped 40,000 pounds of food, clothing and medical supplies to Haiti, via south Florida, immediately after the Jan. 12 earthquake, and employees had collected $50,000, which was matched by the airline.

But this effort for Shalhevet was less formal. Stolls marshaled a half-dozen employees to fly from Los Angeles to Fort Lauderdale and to check in the boxes as personal luggage. When corporate heard what the employees planned, it agreed to ship the additional boxes as cargo at no charge. Virgin America transported 22 50-pound boxes for Shalhevet.

Lipner, Chameides and a crew of students   met with the airline’s employees as their flight left Los Angeles International Airport for Fort Lauderdale on Feb. 17.
Lipner and Chameides have been amazed at the response on all sides.

“Money is a very abstract thing. You can say, ‘I’m giving $100,’ but then you can’t really see the money in use,” Lipner said. “But when you’re carrying boxes of stuff that will actually be used, or when you see someone wrapped in gauze that you helped pack, you think, ‘Wow, I was part of that effort. I contributed to that.’”