The article below is from a recent BearingPoint newsletter which chronicled how employees and subcontractors (including WDI personnel) in Cyprus assisted evacuees from Lebanon escaping the Middle East conflict. WDI is a subcontractor to BearingPoint on the Partnership for Economic Growth project.
A BearingPoint Team based in Cyprus assisted with the evacuation of over 12,000 U.S. citizens from war-torn Lebanon. The evacuees were brought by boat from Lebanon to Cyprus and bused to a fair ground that served as temporary housing for thousands of evacuees before they could be boarded onto aircraft that took them home to the United States.
Exhausted, frightened and frequently distraught, thousands of evacuees streamed into Cyprus with all they could pack. BearingPoint consultants, US Embassy staff, the US marines and volunteers worked side by side to assemble sleeping cots, offload buses, carry bags, carry children, register evacuees, check documents, answer phones, make-up beds, pick up trash, re-load buses – all while answering an endless barrage of questions. With humor and compassion and goodwill towards all - you name it, the BearingPoint team did it.
Some people were in wheelchairs and some were traveling with as many as ten children. There were a lot of mothers traveling alone with children; one with seven children ages 3
to 12. Many had driven to the port area in Beirut multiple times, through the areas being bombed, to get on one of the boats out of Lebanon. Most people held up well, but everyone was exhausted.
Long before the first boat left Lebanon, the BearingPoint team implementing the Cyprus Partnership for Economic Growth program offered to help. They are bankers, trade experts, agricultural and financial specialists. They included long-term advisors to the Cyprus project, short-term advisors, finance officers, Cypriot staff members and even one BearingPoint consultant who were in Cyprus on vacation.
Everyone was there, doing whatever they could, for no other reason then that they wanted to help. The BearingPoint Team Cyprus included: Bryan Stirewalt; Bryan Crosswhite; Gerhard Zechner; Ken Pfeifer; Selcuk Benter; Laura Powers; Adrian Rouse; Rabih Helou (the vacationer); Kent McNeil; Keith Sproule (from WDI, a subcontractor)
and Kate Thompson.
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, U.S. Ambassador to Cyprus Ronald Schlicher, USAID and the entire U.S. Embassy staff expressed their thanks and gratitude, but perhaps the greatest gratitude came from the evacuees themselves, and therein the greatest personal reward.