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By Sally Voth - svoth@nvdaily.com
FRONT ROYAL -- A small plane crammed with relief aid for Haiti's earthquake victims was grounded by Saturday's snowstorm.
Haitian native Nellie C. Goen arrived early Friday evening at the Front Royal-Warren County Airport with more supplies destined for Borgne, Haiti, about 70 miles north of Port-au-Prince.
Her brother, Reginald "Reggie" Cassagnol, manager and fixed base operator at the airport, planned to fly with Winchester pilot Rock Skowbo in Skowbo's Cessna 310 to Cap Haitian, Haiti, on Saturday morning.
Instead, they took off Sunday morning, stopping in Melbourne, Fla., before flying on to the Bahamas, where they planned to spend the night, and then fly to Haiti this morning, Goen said in a Sunday evening phone interview.
"They just didn't want to [fly] to Haiti in the dark," she said.
Lined up next to the plane Friday were dozens of boxed American Red Cross cots, a bag full of toilet paper and numerous black duffle bags labeled with orange tape. In those bags were toiletries, including soap, towels,
toothpaste and more toilet paper.
A generator was also making the trip, as were some catheters.
Cassagnol and Goen's sister, Rose-Marie Chierici, is the co-founder of Pwoje Espwa, or H.O.P.E., which does outreach work in Borgne.
Cassagnol said he didn't know how long he and Skowbo would be in Haiti.
"It will be a quick turnaround," he said. "We may be down there for a day. We're delivering it to the source. It's not going to sit on the ramp or anything. People will meet us, pick it up."
Cassagnol said he hoped this would be the first of a series of trips he could make to Haiti delivering aid.
"We need support for that," he said.
Money for airplane fuel is needed, Cassagnol said.
"This is the second trip [on behalf of H.O.P.E]," Goen said. "The first trip left on Tuesday and it left out of Florida. That trip took the first load of medical supplies and one of the volunteers as well. The first flight could only take two boxes of cots because we had so many more emergency medical supplies."
Three dozen cots were to be delivered on the second flight, she said.
"They have no place to put the people," Goen said.
However, after an "urgent call from my sister," Goen took out half the cots, and instead bought as many air mattresses as she could find.
"[Chierici said] that instead of sending all the cots, to send half of the cots and then I had to buy some inflatable mattresses because a lot of the people, they were crushed or they have back injuries, and so the cots were kind of hard," Goen said Sunday. "They decided that if they had air mattresses, then it's like a hospital bed."
H.O.P.E. works with a hospital and clinic in Borgne, she said. In addition, H.O.P.E. offers aid relating to education and economic development.
"They started to drop, literally drop, people off by truck late last week at the hospital and at the airport," Goen said on Friday. "A lot of the supplies that we received were things that people had dropped off at the Haitian embassy in Washington."
She sent a news release from the organization on Sunday afternoon.
"Michael Shields, H.O.P.E.'s Board Chair, who is now [in] Borgne, states that the staff of 70 health workers in Borgne is working tirelessly to care for an increasing number of refugees and post op patients!" the release says. "He stresses that the situation is heart wrenching and that needs are dire and increasing each hour. The local high school adjacent to H.O.P.E.'s community hospital has been converted to a 200 patient treatment center. The needs are for medications and supplies for both urgent and chronic care."
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