On a 30-minute flight aboard a prop plane, three athletes silently gazed out the windows onto an earthquake-crippled country. Then they landed, and things really got jarring.
An early-afternoon sun baked the dark dirt roads in Cap-Haitien, Haiti. Two flights - a jet from American to Port-au-Prince, a proverbial puddle jumper from there to Cap-Haitien - had left Max Talbot feeling hungry last Saturday. He pulled a nutrition bar from his knapsack.
Inside a transport vehicle, Penguins teammate Mike Rupp and former Pirates first baseman Sean Casey, an Upper St. Clair native, swapped guilty expressions with Talbot. Six sickly skinny orphans stood outside that vehicle, inside of which three millionaires would have paid any cost for five more nutrition bars.
"Max gave the bar to one kid," Rupp said. "I think we all were just expecting a free-for-all brawl to break out. But the kid took off the wrapper and broke that bar into six pieces, making sure he handed a piece to his guys.
"It's just a little thing; it's just sharing. That made the reason for this trip really evident to me. It was, like, 'These kids are just trying to survive.'"
They'll need help in the form of $150,000 - the amount needed to finish a nearby second orphanage. The old one, EBAC Orphanage, works fine enough for 80 orphans, but the numbers game is being lost. Too many orphans (more than 100) and not enough cover (one roof) for the nearby three-story orphanage that Talbot described as "a matter of life and death."
"Without it, some of the kids might not survive the winter," Talbot said. "They need shelter, and there isn't enough. I saw it for myself."
Added Casey: "It's scary stuff to think about it."
Brad Henderson, volunteer chaplain for the Penguins and Pirates, wanted the three athletes to think about it over the course of a three-day visit to Cap-Haitien. He had thought about it enough on trips over the past 15 years.
He is aware two women from Fayette County (Alice Guys and Kathy Goukers) that run the 30-year-old EBAC orphanage are counting on him, as are the former orphans who bought the second orphanage land and spent five years convincing political officials the facility was "not luxurious."
For the roof to be complete by December, thus avoiding the winter months, Henderson needs some North American star power now.
Casey and Rupp returned to Pittsburgh on Monday and that night joined their wives in drafting plans for future fundraising events for Henderson's Pittsburgh Kids Foundation, which supports his Haiti work. Talbot said the local chapter of his charitable foundation will announce next month that all funds from its debut event will go toward the orphanage project.
Rupp already knows the story he'll share with teammates during workouts at Southpointe in the upcoming weeks.
He had barely placed both feet on the ground last Saturday when a small boy grabbed his hand and dragged him toward a bedroom, which Rupp described as "kind of dungeon-looking."
"It wasn't a big room, and there were stacked bunk beds in it, and it was crowded, and dark," Rupp said. "It was his room, though. He wasn't just happy with what he had. He was proud of it - just like my boy is with his bedroom.
"That's when it hit home that I have to help."
