Waterford man Brian Healy is off on his humanitarian travels again, this time helping earthquake victims in Haiti with GOAL.
He has joined the team delivering aid and assistance as the Irish organisation’s Logistics Co-Coordinator in the stricken capital of Port-au-Prince.
A native of The Cove, Tramore, Brian has spent the past number of years travelling the globe as a GOAL volunteer. In 2005, in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, he worked with the survivors of a devastating earthquake that claimed the lives of between up to 80,000 people.
Not long after returning home he spent seven months in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on GOAL’s street children programmes.
From there Brian, 35, switched his attentions to South Sudan and has since had stints in GOAL’s Galway office and the Democratic Republic of Congo, before heading back in South Sudan a second time.
He actually travelled to Haiti from New Zealand, having moved there with his girlfriend. He’d been due to take up a post in Nairobi with GOAL, but chose to divert to the scene of the earthquake instead.
A very experienced ‘GOALie’, who has seen at first hand some of the toughest and most heartbreaking situations in the developing world, it was no surprise when John O’Shea & co summoned him to the scene of the worst earthquake in recent memory.
A committed humanitarian, Brian – whose life was changed by famine footage from Ethiopia in 1984 – dreamt from childhood of travelling around the world to help those in greatest need. “Humanitarian work will probably be the hardest work you will ever do,” he said just before Christmas. “You have to be serious about; it’s not just an adventure or for getting a few pictures with the locals; you have to treat it with respect.”
