Team Rubicon Began In 2010 With A Unique Dual Mission: Providing Disaster Relief And Giving Struggling American Veterans A Vital Sense Of Purpose. The Program Has A Reputation For Ignoring Best Practices And Obliterating Red Tape, And It Has Already Disrupted The Aid Industry. Now founder Jake Wood Wants To Take On The Red Cross.
It was January 12, 2010. Wood, then 26, was in boxers on his couch in Burbank, California, when, 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a previously unmapped fault line ruptured. The resulting 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed at least 160,000 people and displaced one million more. By week’s end, Wood was in the disaster zone, helping to splint the compound fracture of a 14-year old girl and curing his post-deployment boredom with the comfort of chaos.
Wood didn’t go to Haiti alone. He spent the first four days after the quake assembling a team of eight volunteers, including two doctors, Team Rubicon cofounder William McNulty, a former intelligence contractor in Iraq, and Mark Hayward, a retired Army Special Forces medic. While Wood hustled in Burbank, McNulty, a compulsive and gifted organizer who lived in Washington, D.C., got permission from a contact at the Haitian embassy for the looseknit team to transport medical narcotics and perform what amounted to a special-ops aid mission. McNulty, then 32, also used his connections as a Jesuit to set up a base of operations at a seminary in the disaster zone.
Five days after the quake, as most established nonprofits stood back and waited for Haiti to stabilize, the team fl ew to the neighboring Dominican Republic ahead of their larger shipment of narcotics. They carried with them just a few duffel bags full of medical supplies. From there they hitched a ride to Port-au-Prince with a 70-year-old expat whose belt buckle was engraved with John Wayne’s face.
This story is from the August 2016 edition of Outside Magazine.
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This story is from the August 2016 edition of Outside Magazine.
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