Hollywood to Haiti: Patricia Arquette

It’s roughly 3,000 miles from Hollywood to Haiti, but Primetime Emmy-winning actress Patricia Arquette, whose final season of CBS series Medium wraps January 2011, has been traveling regularly from her series set to the island nation, since Haiti's devastating earthquake of one year ago. She aims to transform more squalid tent cities into tidy villages using converted shipping containers.

Arquette got the idea after a friend — a nurse who’d been among the first responders following the seven-point quake — urged her to help.

Having read about how shipping containers could be made into clean, dry shelters, she began making calls and soon lined up assistance from Houston architect Christopher Robertson, who has won awards for his innovative container homes.

Grad students specializing in low-cost housing and sanitation are among the volunteers who’ve come aboard the project, which is moving forward under the auspices of Give Love, a foundation started by Arquette and designer Rosetta Getty. Actor Sean Penn, who has been working in Haiti since the quake, donated 600 tents to supplant the makeshift cloth and plastic coverings people were using for shelter.

It’s an enormous job. A setback came when the tent camp where the Give Love group was working was flooded. Volunteers set about cleaning overflowing toilets and removed a corpse. Arquette recalls “cleaning a woman’s wounds — she’d walked up with blood all over her legs because a dog had bitten her. My brothers David and Richmond and [actor] Balthazar Getty were moving old women out of standing water to dry."

But progress is being made. Prototype container houses are up now. Suitable land for the model village they plan to replicate has been located. "Our sanitation test was incredible," Arquette reports. "We achieved CDC [Centers for Disease Control] and World Health Organization standards our first day.”

When production on Medium resumed this past summer for the show’s seventh and final season, Arquette has had to limit her Haiti visits to those rare weeks when she has two days off. Her twenty-one-year old son and seven-year-old daughter have been supportive, she says.

Ask Arquette why she’s doing this, and she describes her new Haitian friends as having “this brilliant spirit that’s shiny like the sun.” She also admits, “All my life I’ve felt a little apologetic for my success and all the great things in my life when there is so much suffering in the world.” Now she finds her two lives “can work together and complement each other.”