If it looks as if Sean Penn is just another Hollywood star courting headlines with a camera-ready cause, look again. Since January, barely stopping to promote his next film, Fair Game, the actor, director, and activist has plunged full-time into Haitian earthquake-relief work, armed with a Glock pistol and a golden Rolodex. Near Port-au-Prince, where Penn runs one of Haiti’s largest displaced-persons camps, the author reports on the A-team Penn has assembled, his down-and-dirty methods, his unlikely partnership with the U.S. Army, and the needs that drive him.
Last year Penn’s life went into a tailspin. Though he’d taken home an Academy Award for Milk (six years after his first best-actor Oscar, for Mystic River), he was still reeling from the death, three years earlier, of his younger brother, Chris, from issues related to a heart condition. Then his marriage dissolved. “She is a ghost to me now,” he says of actress Robin Wright Penn, who had been his longtime anchor. “We spent all those years together.… Now she’s just gone.” They sold their Marin County house—recently valued at $15 million—and Penn moved to Malibu, just down the road from his mother, the actress Eileen Ryan.
In October, his friend Dennis Hopper was hospitalized with complications from what turned out to be advanced prostate cancer. Over Christmas, close acquaintances (I count myself among them, having known Penn for a decade) worried about his psyche. Arguably, many of Penn’s wounds were self-inflicted. He traded in his Nicorette gum for a three-pack-a-day habit. He was depressed, tightly wound, and painfully over-reflective. Feeling rudderless as a bachelor, and with a midlife milestone looming on the horizon (he turns 50 in August), Penn abruptly pulled out of two scheduled movies—Cartel and The Three Stooges (he was set to play Larry)—walking away from millions.
Throughout this period, Penn was attuned to the boyhood interests of his son, Hopper (named after the actor), who plays guitar. For eight straight months, as it happens, Penn had full custody of his son, accompanying him to Pearl Jam and Green Day concerts. Penn cooked up a surprise for Hopper’s 16th birthday, composing a poetic meditation on the generational divide. “I tried recording it myself,” Penn contends, “but my voice is awful. So I got Everlast—one of Hopper’s favorite singers—to record it for me on CD, and gave Hopper a copy.”
Three months later, the teenager sustained a head injury in a skateboard accident. Sean and Robin pulled together at the hospital, praying for their injured son. “He underwent risky surgery due to intense bleeding of the brain,” Penn says, “and he pulled through.”
Hopper’s brush with disaster was life-changing for his father. Feeling a karmic debt had to be repaid, Penn started the painful process of re-assessing his life’s priorities. He drove out to Palm Springs to spend time with T Bone Burnett, the composer-producer who helped Bob Dylan find Jesus in the 1970s. Though Penn had starred in nearly 40 movies since his 1982 breakout film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and had achieved a critical plateau virtually unmatched by any actor of his generation, he began to feel he was unfulfilled, self-absorbed, and straining for political relevance. Thinking back over the last few months, he sees his work in Haiti as a sort of culmination—and vindication. “I wanted to give back something more to help struggling people, but I didn’t know how to best do it,” Penn says, trying to come up with an accurate description of his myriad motivations. “I was for 20 years in a relationship with Robin and 18 years with children. I didn’t have time to commit to anything—for real—in places like Iraq, except to denounce the war. But now I’m single. I can lend a hand.”
While this sentiment might strike some as narcissistic, as if Penn perceived others’ misfortune as having been conveniently timed to suit some sort of personal schedule or agenda, he means nothing of the kind. Sometimes, against all odds, a well-intentioned “crisis intervention” by someone of renown—replete with celebrity pronouncements and seemingly quirky behavior—is actually, beneath it all, an act of deep commitment and sacrifice. Sometimes, despite all the superficial baggage of Hollywood fame, something of substance happens.
An Activist’s Roots
The substance, in Penn’s case, was not always so clear to everyone. He had spent much of the previous decade, in fact, trying to chart a path as a human-rights crusader—with only sporadic success. Growing up, he had admired the 60s folksinger Phil Ochs, who had performed at a protest concert in Uruguay and was later arrested. He looked up to singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, who had been in Cuba during the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco. In 2002, Penn took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post to publish an emotive “open letter” denouncing President George W. Bush, who was about to spearhead the invasion of Iraq. A few years later, at a San Francisco peace rally, he told Bush to take his “blood-soaked underwear … and shove it.” When Penn undertook missions to Iraq and Iran, he was lambasted by the pundits and, to some degree, seemed to be goading his critics on. “My ultimate hero was my father,” he says of actor-director Leo Penn. “He was a highly decorated World War II bombardier and tail gunner who was then blacklisted during the McCarthy anti-Communist purge in Hollywood. Believe me … he was fearless. I draw inspiration from his courage all the time.”
And then, in August 2005, came Hurricane Katrina. The week the flood hit, Penn and I, along with several other volunteers, patrolled the hard-hit Central City neighborhood of New Orleans in a couple of motorboats. (I had lived and taught history in the city for 13 years.) Even the most experienced relief and rescue veterans among us were wary of diving into the putrid, possibly toxic floodwaters. Not Penn, a former competitive surfer. Displaying a mix of bravado, altruism, and daredevil recklessness, he repeatedly swam over to trapped homeowners to take them to higher and drier ground. One woman was screaming when we arrived, “Oh, my God! My baby! My child’s upstairs!” She was standing on a stoop on the one section of her house that was not submerged. But as soon as the boat pulled closer, she stopped and lowered her voice: “Oh, my God. It’s Sean Penn. I saw you in Dead Man Walking“—and she went on to list his films, like a movie critic, even as we escorted her family into the boat.
Penn had begun to find his social bearings. His Dirty Hands Caravan assisted beleaguered residents of New Orleans. He became an ambassador for the World Food Programme. He made a couple of overtly political pictures—All the King’s Men (in which he played a character based on Huey Long, the populist governor of Louisiana) and Milk (portraying gay-rights activist Harvey Milk)—and studied the tactics and temperaments of American outliers who had become powerful public figures. He began a dialogue with Cuba’s Castro brothers and praised the virtues of socialism. He visited President Hugo Chávez in Caracas, Venezuela. (I went along, as a historian for CBS News, joined by Vanity Fair’s Christopher Hitchens.) And when Penn, writing for The Nation, ended up vouching for the Venezuelan leader’s “democratic” impulses, American conservatives excoriated the ultra-left’s darling as a Hollywood softy. “I’ve been called every ugly name in the book,” he now says, “and I’m no worse for wear.”
Even so, he seemed restless, challenged, unfulfilled. Sean Penn the activist was searching for his next act.
When Penn first heard that an earthquake had struck Haiti, he was alone in the hills of Malibu. “I had been Hopper’s guardian,” Penn recalls. “And he had just gone back to being with his mother on an experimental basis. I was putzing around at home, missing Hopper.
“I had never been to Haiti before. I couldn’t fathom the high death toll. So, like everybody else, I started tracking the news. I saw all those traumatized people getting Civil War medicine on TV. People were being given ibuprofen or alcohol for amputations. Hopper had been saved by IV pain medicine. It comforted him so much.”
Penn became a man obsessed. Within 48 hours, he devised a plan to recruit a group of physicians, lease an old DC-4, fill its cargo bay with food, water, and pain medicine, and fly to Haiti like a cavalry outfit. Serendipitously, at a friend’s house in Malibu, he started up a conversation with Diana Jenkins, a young, Sarajevo-born philanthropist and entrepreneur. Jenkins’s well-funded Irnis Catic Foundation had addressed the ongoing issues affecting Bosnian war refugees. On the spot, she offered him a million-dollar pledge and agreed to come along. He also pitched in a substantial sum himself.
Conscripting doctors turned out to be the easy part. Penn’s next hurdle was getting permission to land in Port-au-Prince at a time when rescue was being given priority over relief. He turned to Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich, who helped Penn work around the red tape by putting him in touch with Craig Kelly, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs. “The ambassador urged me on,” says Penn. “I made it clear to the State Department that I would be self-reliant and have something of value to offer. They said, ‘Go for it.’” Thus was born J/P HRO: Jenkins/Penn Haitian Relief Organization. (Penn’s daughter, Dylan, then 18, got out a stencil kit and, with help from Hopper, designed the new NGO’s logo.)
Penn’s stars were starting to align. Shortly before leaving for Haiti, he ran into Jim McGhin at Spruzzo, a popular seaside restaurant in Malibu. Three years before, he’d met McGhin, a steel-company executive involved in a Haitian mining venture—and a Republican—at the Auld Dubliner, a watering hole in Squaw Valley. “Jim is a high-octane Georgia steelman,” Penn says. “He’s a charming and dangerous man. Stocky, ruddy-faced, square-jawed.” Over beers, Penn had described his newfound passion for parachuting. “Sure enough,” says McGhin, soon the two were headed to a skydiving center in Perris, California. “We drove in a red Hertz Mustang convertible, and after instructional courses, we jumped. Sean was enthralled. He was just elated, bouncing on his feet over the rush of it all.”
After free-falling together, Penn and McGhin became fast friends despite their differences, though they lost touch for a while. “I’m a Republican, he’s a Democrat,” McGhin says. “We’ve had a few blowups … so we just skip the politics.” Their chance January meeting in Malibu reconnected them. “What I like about Sean is that his heart is as big as a washtub,” says McGhin. “And he doesn’t hold grudges.” Over several “boys’ cocktails,” as McGhin puts it, Penn laid out his Haitian-relief scheme. McGhin worried that Penn appeared to be underestimating the extent to which gang-related criminal activity, in the quake’s aftermath, had already sprung up in certain areas of Port-au-Prince. So McGhin offered to accompany Penn and provide a security detail.
Penn prided himself on the squad he’d assembled. Leading the roster was Alison Thompson, a mid-40s filmmaker and former medical aide from Australia, whom Penn had befriended after watching The Third Wave, her powerful documentary about the Asian tsunami of 2004. The pigtailed Thompson—who resembles Heidi when she wraps her blond tresses in a British Red Cross scarf—was raised by Church of England missionaries and is spurred on by a commitment to Christian service. When the quake hit, in January, Penn texted Thompson one word: “Haiti.” She fired back, “I wanna go! You?”
Working together, they lined up a dozen doctors from across the country. Designer Donna Karan provided blankets and other provisions. Film producer Oscar Gubernati, who is Thompson’s partner, was enlisted as Penn’s deputy. Along with Jenkins, the team would also come to include actress Maria Bello, a mainstay of the Save Darfur Coalition, who for three years had also focused on improving the condition of Haitian women and children; volunteer Julie Santos, who worked with displaced youngsters; and onetime Haitian police chief Edner Nonez (nicknamed Rambo for his tough demeanor), who signed on as Penn’s all-purpose assistant and security expert. “If I did something right in Haiti,” says Penn, “it had to do with casting. I knew the players I needed—and found them.”
Thompson’s most significant contribution, according to Penn, “was introducing me to the Frishmans. They’re my rocks. Irreplaceable.” Barry Frishman, at 54 the elder statesman of Team Penn, is a former oysterman and tugboat captain, who spends his summers in Virginia leading eco-tours so that during the winter months he can afford to perform relief work. The goateed Captain Barry, as he’s called, has dug wells, jury-rigged electrical systems, and ferried stranded flood victims in places like Guatemala, Liberia, and Sri Lanka. His wife, Aleda, with a J.D. in human-rights law from Hofstra, would work the e-mail and phone lines, chain-smoking and charming her way through any administrative roadblock.
Alpha Dog Digs In
McGhin, for his part, served as Penn’s advance man. He arrived in Haiti six days after the disaster, just hours before Penn and company. McGhin brought along a crew of eight guards equipped with body armor, pistols, and shotguns. After landing in Port-au-Prince, Penn helped unload the DC-4 (a plane so old, according to McGhin, it had flown paratroopers on D-day, in 1944) and headed to meet Paul Farmer, the physician, anthropologist, and father of rural health care in Haiti. Together, they strategized about how to piggyback J/P HRO’s doctors onto the network already in place.
Toward evening, Penn headed for the hills and rendezvoused with McGhin and Nonez, who, for their temporary headquarters, had secured a deteriorated house on a bluff in Pétionville, a once affluent suburb of Port-au-Prince. “It turned out that out of four walls,” Penn recalls, “McGhin’s so-called safe house had only one standing. But it was high up, which was better than in the downtown crunch.”
As they pitched their pup tents on the palmetto-fringed lawn, the reality of the situation sank in. An unknown number of Haitians remained unaccounted for, many having been trapped in crumbled homes and damaged offices. Tens of thousands of their countrymen had sustained serious injury and were in need of medical attention. Meanwhile, the whole social fabric of the already impoverished nation had unraveled: There were few passable roadways, no electricity, no waste-processing facilities. There were volleys of gunfire and sporadic looting.
As it happens, however, Penn’s makeshift encampment was just a couple of miles up the road from where the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division had established its operational base, at the Pétionville country club, using a clearing near the tennis courts as a staging area. “My luck was continuing,” Penn recalls. “Everything was insane, yet falling oddly into place.”
Next, McGhin and Nonez paid a visit to Lieutenant Colonel Mike Foster at the army’s compound. McGhin told him how Sean Penn and a team of doctors had set up nearby. And, rather boldly, he requested an army escort to give them a measure of security as they tried to move around the island. A bit of a dance ensued. Foster, with the manners of a southern gentleman and a quarterback’s chiseled features, dispatched a recon team to the site, somewhat suspicious of his new American neighbors, yet concerned for their safety in Haiti. The troops quickly determined that the trauma team was indeed in a precarious spot; they were instructed to decamp to the army’s post.
Almost immediately, the army—according to a military source—ran a serious background check on the actor. The army may have determined it had reason to suspect some Colonel Kurtz shadings, given Penn’s political persuasion, band of freelancers, and unknown motives. Penn, in turn, was initially wary of the army, wanting to know just what the task force saw as its mission there. “Sean is an alpha dog,” McGhin says. “That’s why he’s so aggressive in Hollywood. So there was some standoffishness about embedding with the military. Sean was sniffing them out. And vice versa.”
The setting was surreal. U.S. troops had rented the country club—with its nine-hole golf course, once a favored playground of the Haitian elite—from Bill Evans, an American expatriate. Evans was quite candid when voicing his concern that his manicured course and clubhouse had been “overrun.” At night, Penn’s team slept under the stars, using moonlight and flashlights to find their way in the darkness.
MASH Meets Pee-wee*
The lieutenant colonel and the actor, instead of bristling, decided to join forces. They took a caravan of Humvees, rumbled into towns that hadn’t had antibiotics for days, and handed out medications from temporary clinic tents. On a vacant lot down the road from the clubhouse, they organized daily efforts to give food, water, and drugs to the growing community of Pétionville squatters. When they managed to find some free time, both Foster and Penn discussed emergency care with Susan Briggs, team commander of the local U.S. field hospital and editor of Advanced Disaster Medical Response Manual for Providers. (“Dr. Briggs is a sexy, salty dog,” Penn says. “She is a tough, great, all-around gal.”)
During that first week in country, Penn’s doctors insisted they needed more potent pain medication for the injured. So Penn got in touch with none other than President Chávez, in nearby Venezuela, who agreed to fly in a planeload of morphine and other drugs. Nervous about upsetting his new partner and host, Penn says, he told Foster, “Look, I want to do this by the book and don’t want to cause you problems. But we’re bringing in morphine from Venezuela. Chávez has agreed to send it. Are you O.K. with this?” According to a source close to Penn, Foster didn’t hesitate in responding positively and insisted that treating the injured was their first priority; any complaints could be addressed later. (Foster, deployed overseas, was unavailable for comment.)
Foster agreed to hand over a portion of the golf-course grounds to J/P HRO to run as they saw fit. Immediately, Penn purchased a white, 60-by-20-foot wedding tent from the Dominican Republic. And like Grant entrenched at Vicksburg, he erected his shelter—a crude roof over a patchwork of wooden floorboards, which he helped cobble together by hand. Inside, Penn set up his own tent-cum-office with two rusty-blade fans whirring to keep things cool. Hanging from the ceiling was a single bulb—its lampshade fashioned from Chef Boyardee boxes—illuminating a long wooden table of bird-dropping white. A forlorn bookshelf held a collection of dog-eared U.N.-regulation guides, accordian files, and browning bananas. Down the length of one wall ran a corkboard lined with maps from the U.S. Geological Survey; an army cartographer had handsomely re-christened one, changing the name from Pétionville to Pennville. A calico cat named Guadalupe wandered among a collection of stethoscopes, tool kits, syringes, morphine, a photocopy machine—and a stash of Greek wine and Jack Daniel’s—giving the quarters the patina of MASH, with a touch of Pee-wee’s Playhouse.*
“A Doer and Not a Talker”
Clutter aside, there was much about Penn to engender esteem in the eyes of the G.I.’s. Though his politics tacked hard left, the guy seemed fearless. And he carried a gun. And he was a movie star. He also had an actor’s ability to improvise, natural leadership skills, and a distrust of bureaucrats. When he would falter in the heat, medics would hook him up to an IV bag for a while, and then he’d re-enter the fray, re-invigorated. Observers began to envy his ability to use his network of connections, and his sheer wiliness, to find anything at any hour. He figured out how to import fire extinguishers, a much-needed X-ray machine, and rabies vaccine (after learning that a mad dog was on the loose). He even hired a troupe of magicians to come in and raise the camp kids’ spirits.
“My politics are not in line with Sean Penn’s,” observes the task force’s Major General Simeon Trombitas. “But we are allied in trying to save lives and alleviate human suffering. He is a doer and not a talker … and I respect that immensely.”
Penn says he was given limited Department of Homeland Security clearance—to help approve patients for transport to obtain lifesaving surgery in America. He and McGhin attended military planning meetings. After two weeks in Haiti, Diana Jenkins returned to the U.S. to continue her humanitarian efforts (coordinating plane flights for earthquake victims, planning a Bosnian-related conference in The Hague, and setting up a Haitian fund-raiser in L.A. for the Clinton Foundation), which left Penn in operational control of J/P HRO.
Then, in March, just days before Lieutenant Colonel Foster was set to be re-deployed—to Afghanistan, by way of Fort Benning—he personally gave Penn a Commander’s Award for Service, pinning the medal on the actor’s lapel in a formal ceremony as a clutch of army rangers looked on.
“He was so wise, decisive, kind,” Penn says of Foster. “He didn’t have any preconceived ideas about me as a rebel or lefty. He judged me only by my performance. So I kept leaning forward.”
Work Boots and Earth Shoes
Over the past five months, Penn has shed weight—down 15 pounds at one point. In the humidity, his mop of chestnut hair sometimes goes full Eraserhead. He chain-smokes American Spirits (“yellows”) and Marlboro Lights. His personal effects have been reduced to the basics: a sleeping bag, a squirt bottle of disinfectant, a carpenter’s ruler, a supply of bedtime Ambien, and some ball caps and T-shirts, which are usually drenched with sweat and dust. Among his NGO and U.N. counterparts (each day Penn attends three or four ass-numbing planning and strategy sessions), his are usually the lone pair of work boots in a sea of sandals and Earth shoes.
One afternoon Penn formally briefs two deputy assistant secretaries of defense, James Schear and Frank O. Mora. Then he’s off to work out details for receiving 9,000 tents from the philanthropist C.E.O. of Alaska Structures, Richard Hotes, collected from various U.S. sites and bound for Port-au-Prince—and to throw in 25 volunteers to set them up. An hour later, Penn is outside a shack, chastising an engineer about a precarious drainage ditch.
Word in local NGO circles is that Penn can be a demanding taskmaster. He has no tolerance for political correctness or sub-par performance. He is known to bark out orders to subordinates. (“Goddammit, can’t you hear?”) One evening at a J/P HRO meeting, I’m told, he pounded his fist so hard he shattered a glass tabletop. He has even placed a ban on the use of Facebook by his colleagues.
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To some, the army’s first qualms about Penn may have been justified: they worry aloud that his occasionally dictatorial manner and non-traditional tactics do, in fact, contain shades of an expatriate jungle character out of Joseph Conrad. And his go-go-go style can be daunting to people who are, after all, volunteers. At one stage, when told that a few exhausted workers intend to take off Easter weekend, Penn is clearly disappointed. “Then find me Jewish workers,” he says. “There has to be some around.”
Dire Straits
Despite the harrowing conditions he encounters at every turn, Penn has a spring in his step as he walks the old golf-cart paths that line what used to be fairways. He passes pigs wallowing in sand traps that are piled high with rubbish. Human refuse runs in rivulets. Now and again, Penn stops to furiously tap the keypad of his BlackBerry, zapping orders to staffers and volunteers.
Every few yards, it seems, malnourished children rush up to Penn and grab at his legs. “Hey, buddy,” he says, his face softening as he looks down at a particular favorite: 14-year-old Jean Pierre, always detectable by his bright-orange cap. Some kids, however, are happy—flying kites, playing tag, and kicking around a half-deflated ball. (On Penn’s watch, 85 babies, at last count, have been born at the camp. And he and his cohorts have arranged U.S.-bound flights for scores of severely injured survivors, many of them children, some of whom have since been adopted.)
Volunteers shuttle in and out for varying stretches. Among them: actor Emile Hirsch; filmmaker Doug Liman; TV personality Jack Osbourne; sisters Kim and Ruby Stewart, the actress-models; and Bruce French, a tour chef for U2 and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. (Both Dylan and Hopper Penn have made trips from California, spending trench time with Dad at Port-au-Prince hospitals.)
Author and therapist Sarah Brokaw, the daughter of former NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw, helps advise women in the camp about health and hygiene. Many Haitians, she observes, are exhibiting signs of post-traumatic stress, feeling as if the ground were still shaking. And 95 percent of the women she has seen, she says, have vaginal infections, due to the heat, lack of undergarments, lax sanitation, and absence of proper hygiene education.
At Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital, Penn stops in on Vanessa Kerry, the Harvard-trained physician and daughter of Massachusetts senator John Kerry. There are scores of patients whose limbs or skulls were crushed or mangled when buildings collapsed. Penn goes over to the bed of a Pétionville man who was almost electrocuted while trying to poach power from a generator. He breathes, but only barely, through a tube. His face is bruised a bluish purple, his burns paisley-patterned, his pulse almost nonexistent. “There was so much voltage going through him that his skin caught fire,” Penn says in a sort of trance. “Just burned him up from head to toe.
“When you go,” he whispers, “you go fast down here. At least he has pain medicine.” The next morning we learn that the man died quietly.
One of Penn’s secret weapons over the past five months has been the ragtag Global Disaster Immediate Response Team (Global dirt), a group of young, committed hellions that is a hybrid of the old Berlin Airlift squadron and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. Founded by Adam Marlatt, a 22-year-old Marine reservist, dirt espouses what Marlatt calls “extreme humanitarianism.” Operating out of their Bat Cave (the dilapidated Park Hotel in Port-au-Prince), they work like black-marketeers, procuring everything from chocolate pudding to penicillin. And they’re amazing with bolt cutters. While another large relief group is busy debating how best to distribute crates of oranges, dirt somehow finds a produce warehouse and “borrows” pallets of fruit cups to disseminate immediately. (One night when Marlatt got rather drunk, he says, he asked Penn to tattoo a tiny cross on Marlatt’s ankle with a safety pin and ink from a ballpoint pen.)
Penn, who acknowledges dirt’s “Jackass-imbecilic side,” smiles paternally on the cadre’s knack for converting bread trucks into ambulances or for gaining access to landing strips and hospital wards—no questions asked. “Their genius,” he contends, “is in connecting all the disparate clinics that popped up. They do it all pro bono. Their results are more effective than many huge NGOs. dirt’s attitude is anchored around the kleptomaniac’s snatch-and-grab approach.”
Enter the General
Penn is quick to praise the U.S. Armed Forces (“They go places and do a job”) and is particularly fond of Catholic Relief Services (“I was impressed—they know how to feed folks”). He also has abiding respect for scores of his U.N. and NGO colleagues. That said, he is careful to point out what he sees as an inherent risk whenever diverse, committed groups vie to make their mark on the world. “Many people in the U.N. and NGO disaster-relief community share much with Hollywood: envy, Schadenfreude, and the cover [that] bureaucracy gives to a cult of unimaginative ambulance chasers—all of whom want to claim it was they who ‘made the movie’ on Haitian relief.”
Enter Lieutenant General P. K. “Ken” Keen, the Kentucky-born army ranger with a bulldog’s tenacity and enough medals on his chest to sink a U-boat. Keen, who has recently replaced Foster as Penn’s military partner, is deputy commander of the U.S. Southern Command. Deeply attuned to the challenges faced by the Haitian people, he has taken an instant shine to Penn.
Some days, the unlikely pair, with their matching dark sunglasses and deep Caribbean tans, can be spotted tooling around Haiti in a Jeep, inspecting disaster sites, assessing triage centers, deploying water-distribution stands. “In a humanitarian crisis you can be a neutral—always pinching your knuckles white,” says Keen, who ran the Ranger Task Force during the 1991 Gulf War. “Or you can operate an NGO the way Mr. Penn does.… Mr. Penn has brought both international attention and resources to Haiti. He intuitively knew how to both work with the U.N. and break its bureaucracy down. He’s proved a willing candidate to collaborate with us. I applaud all the leadership he has shown. He doesn’t have to do this.”
Like Foster before him, General Keen holds an outdoor ceremony to present Penn with a military coin and several honorary certificates of commendation for his service in the Haitian crisis. “Keen gave me this look in the eye—a look of pride,” Penn recalls. “It meant more to me than any movie award.”
Soon thereafter, Penn meets with Haitian president René Préval to discuss the possibility of flash floods in Camp Pétionville. (Penn praises the Haitian government and Préval, saying, “He’s the prodigy of the new Haiti.”) And when former president Bill Clinton swings through on one of his humanitarian forays, Keen puts in a good word about Penn’s efforts. Clinton, who summons the actor to an NGO meeting in Port-au-Prince, makes a point of announcing, “Sean, your ears must be burning. General Keen was just telling me about all the incredible work you’re doin’.”
The next afternoon an army major who is a close friend of Penn’s comes by to see him.
“Well,” he says, “you saw Clinton yesterday, didn’t you?”
“Yep,” Penn says, smiling back. “And …your point?”
“Well, Clinton spoke to General Keen, and guess what my new assignment is.”
Penn shrugs in response.
“I’m now officially Sean Penn’s butt boy. Can ya believe it, bro? Do you know how that makes me feel? Not all that great. But I’m officially supposed to make sure you-u-u-u get whateveryou-u-u-u need!”
By week’s end Sean Penn and J/P HRO have been officially named Pétionville camp manager by NGO consensus, a decision endorsed by U.N. officials. And the army rangers are on their toes, responding pronto to a rash of new orders.
The Next Act
For a moment, Penn stops to fret about the coming hurricane season, which typically lasts from June to October. With it, he warns, comes the prospect of a new round of disaster: mud slides, famine, civil unrest. Already, there have been outbreaks of TB, malaria, dengue fever, and highly contagious diphtheria, placing many in the camp, including Penn, at risk. Also on the upswing: suicide, physical abuse, and cases of enraged husbands and partners—with other children to feed—attacking pregnant women to induce miscarriage. Rape and syphilis are rampant. A ramshackle red-light district has been established in the vicinity. The camp minister, Pastor Jean St. Cyr, has just received a death threat. One riot has been quietly quashed; other, smaller uprisings follow, but are tamped down by St. Cyr.
And Penn now has a new, immediate challenge. Joint Task Force—Haiti has been reduced from 22,000 troops (at its February peak) to 2,200 to 500. Penn’s main logistical headaches: Can he continue to channel help and resources to the displaced? And, once the army departs, how does he get additional security—from the Haitian population, outside volunteers, or private contracting firms—into and around the camp? Ostensibly, he knows, the facility is run by local authorities, has nominal autonomy, and has set up its own political structure. In truth, Penn, J/P HRO, and St. Cyr are in charge of the shambles. If a fire breaks out (a very real concern) or the camp turns rebellious, they’re the ones who will be left holding the bag.
Much of Camp Pétionville is on low-lying terrain and is extremely flood-prone. Penn and representatives from other NGOs have been asked by Keen to move thousands of the facility’s most vulnerable people to high ground. After careful inspection, the Haitian Ministry of Public Works and the U.N. have declared some homes “green” (structurally sound enough to inhabit). Penn’s most delicate task is persuading families that once occupied what are now “red” edifices (uninhabitable) to leave their tents for new dwellings. In April he managed to do just that, helping to resettle 5,000. “Trying to relocate traumatized people along 40 miles outside of Port-au-Prince is tricky business,” Penn admits. “It’s not the job of the U.S. Armed Forces to do that. They make the conditions viable by constructing camp exits and helping find viable land. But it’s the job of NGOs like J/P HRO to convince them to leave.
“As Pétionville camp manager and C.E.O. of J/P HRO, I have a lot of life-and-death responsibilities. Death has been a presence around us. But there it is. I don’t want to ever feel I copped out on these families. How could I live with myself?
“Haiti has been plundered, raped, despoiled, and skinned for so long, endemic poverty has become its historical condition. But Haitians are resilient,” he says, his lips upturned with the hint of a smile. “And they will prevail.”
The game plan is for J/P HRO to stay permanently engaged in the country. Penn, however, is scheduled to start filming Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be the Placein August; he’ll play a retired rock star who goes on a search to find the ex-Nazi war criminal who persecuted his father. Penn, though, is committed to Haiti for the long haul and says he plans to return as soon as possible.
“There is no exit for me until there is more life than death,” Penn says. “I can always see light in any situation. It’s just the way I’m made. I’m capable of making foolish commitments. Of being a fool. But I can see the light very clearly in terms of the ‘big picture’ for Haiti. It’s a pretty damn distant light. But the brightness of the Haitians’ eyes is enough to make you giddy. There is a strength of character in the people who have, by and large, never experienced comfort. That’s exactly the character that our Main Street culture lacks and needs in the United States. In other words, we need Haiti.”
Conditions in Camp Pétionville have improved significantly since Penn took over as manager 24-7. According to many observers, much of the pent-up fury and confusion has dissipated. Some in the facility contend that they don’t want to relocate at all, not with the island’s tottering infrastructure, not when they’ve been given access to everything from three meals a day to classes for children.
Team Penn, in fact, has helped bring about a real social-engineering achievement. But the actor insists that the displaced people of Pétionville have given him a gift as well. “It’s been a reciprocal thing,” he says. “They have returned to me something I had lost—my humility.”
Thomas Niedermueller via Getty Images
Associated Press
