10:08 a.m., April 23, 2010----After Haiti was devastated by an earthquake on Jan. 12, one of the first nations to send help was Israel.

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Some three months later, on April 14, Daniel Biran, Israel's ambassador of administrative affairs, visited the University of Delaware campus to discuss how that relief effort unfolded, first to a group of UD administrators and then before a public talk sponsored by the Kristol Center for Jewish Life Hillel Foundation and the Israeli Consulate of Philadephia.

Biran played a key role in Israel's rescue efforts in Haiti, and he was on site in the stricken country within two days of the earthquake.

“When we hear about a disaster, it doesn't matter where it is - we offer assistance,” he said.

Once the decision was made to lend assistance, the challenge was to actually get there. With assistance from the U.S. Army, he and his colleagues were able to helicopter into Haiti, near Port-au-Prince, on the evening of Jan. 14, just two days after the earthquake hit.

Biran described the scene as one of total chaos, with hundreds of bodies everywhere and thousands of people in the streets.

After much negotiation, they were able to get permission to land two planes carrying 75 tons of equipment that would become a field hospital. Eight hours after the planes landed, the field hospital, set up in a soccer field, received its first patient.

The fully equipped hospital included an emergency room, an operating room, a delivery room, a pediatric area, imaging equipment and a pharmacy. During 19 days there, some 1,200 patients were treated, he said.

Noting that amidst the death and destruction, babies also were a delivered at the hospital, Biran said, “In every disaster, there is a glimmer of hope.”

He attributed Israel's commitment to service to a simple concept: Love others as you would love yourself.

“If there is any place in the world I can assist a humanitarian effort, I will do it,” Biran said.

Earlier in his career, Biran was one of Israel's top delegates to participate in Israel's special operations and missions. He was the head of the rescue team after the terrorist attack at the Embassy of Israel in Buenos Aires, key administrator for the function of the field hospital the Israel Defense Forces set up to assist the refugees during the war in Kosovo, and was the government representative to assist the Jewish community in Caracas, Venezuela, after President Chavez's decision to cut relations with Israel.

Photo by Doug Baker