May 4--In the simplest terms, Sasha Gainullin is a fixer.
The vice president of operations for the firm MyAssist, based in Stevens Point, is the guy you call when your luggage disappears, you want that reservation no one can get, or the Haitian officials just blocked your attempt to fly eight injured children to America for medical care.
He'll save your vacation. In this case, he saved lives.
"In my mind, he has a red cape flowing behind him," said pediatrician Ian Goodman, who asked MyAssist to help transport kids he found threatened by infections in a Haitian hospital.
That was one month after an earthquake devastated the country and just days after 10 missionaries from Idaho had been arrested while trying to move children from Haiti to the Dominican Republic.
"It became an administrative nightmare," Goodman said. "To this day, I don't know how he managed to do it. He had the connections. He had the ability."
He does not have a red cape. At least, no such cape was visible at an airport in Haiti on Friday afternoon, when Gainullin delivered four of the children back to their families. Smiling, energetic and healthy, the children were happy to be home.
Four of them remain in Massachusetts, still undergoing treatment in hospitals in the Boston area.
They are expected to return to Haiti in the next month or two, ending an ordeal that started with the earthquake Jan. 12. The eight kids range in age from 2 to 15.
Goodman, a fellow in pediatric medicine at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., flew to Haiti in early February looking for children who could be taken to the U.S. for treatment. More specifically, he sought to identify children who were in danger of losing limbs or their lives because of infections.
The hospital, Sacre Coeurm, had only 70 beds. It was overwhelmed. More than 500 patients sought treatment after the earthquake, and the children, after surgery to repair their broken bones, were forced to sleep on floors. Bugs crawled through their wounds.
"Identifying kids was the easy part," Goodman said. "Getting the kids out of the country was the very difficult part."
A doctor traveling with Goodman, Joeli Hettler, was from Wisconsin and her father knew of John Noel, the founder and CEO of the Noel Group.
Noel built one of the largest travel insurance and assistance companies in the world, and 10 years ago the Noel Group launched MyAssist, a phone-based, worldwide concierge service.
Noel turned to his top man, Gainullin, who works in Milwaukee.
Noel's challenge for him: "How do you get eight little babies out of Haiti after someone tries to take 33 children illegally?"
Gainullin began working through the contacts he had built over more than a decade, in the U.S. State Department, Congress and the U.S. immigration service. He helped secure needed documents for each child, and a medical transport plane to fly them to Massachusetts.
"We followed every single step that both governments wanted, demanded, required," Gainullin said.
Still, just two hours before the group was scheduled to leave, the Haitian government canceled the flight and ordered that no children would be allowed to leave without written permission from the prime minister of Haiti.
Goodman called Gainullin, who responded, "That's not a good reason why they can't get medical care."
Within 20 minutes, the group received the necessary permission and the trip to Massachusetts began.
"When you come to a place like Haiti, you want to make a big difference," Goodman said. "For these children, it was all the difference in the world, to lead a normal life, to live."
For video coverage To view recent footage from a Boston-area TV station: www.wggb.com/global/story.asp?s12275687 To see the first story out of Boston: www.wggb.com/global/story.asp?s12275687
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