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For Air Force it's 'toys from tots'

  • Published
  • By 2nd Lt. Nicholas Mercurio
  • 6th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti --  A young Haitian girl is brought out of a medical tent on a litter. She is wrapped in a light blanket and clutches a small stuffed animal to her chest. Medical personnel carefully load her into the back of a truck and she is driven to a waiting Air Force C-130H for aeromedical evacuation to the United States.

Inside the tent, more Haitian children lie on litters. One by one they are carried out to trucks and brought to the plane. Each is holding a stuffed animal.

"It was his decision," said Airman 1st Class Christopher M. Castleman, a crew chief from the 15th Aircraft Maintenance Unit at Hurlburt Field, Fla. "He heard about the Haitian kids who were hurt and wanted to do something."

Airman Castleman was talking about his 7-year-old son, Christopher. With the help of an equally charitable friend, Barnaby Hernandez, age five, son of Senior Airman Christian F. Hernandez, also of the 15th AMU, the boys gathered a bag of stuffed animals and other toys and sent them to Haiti to help ease the suffering. The toys came from an unlikely place, their closets.

"We had started taping the nightly news," said Thea Castleman, Christopher's mother. "We were hoping to catch a glimpse of 'daddy' because he was at the airport [in Port-au-Prince] and would show up in the background of the video once in a while."
That's when Christopher started seeing the images of the children of Haiti who had been left with nothing. At first he asked if they could adopt one of the Haitian children, his mom said. "I told him we couldn't adopt anyone but if he wanted, we could do something nice for them."

That's when, on a phone call home one night, Airman Castleman suggested sending toys. Christopher went straight to his room and started gathering toys, his mom said. "He wanted to make sure he sent stuffed animals so the kids could use them as pillows."

"Children think toys," Airman Hernandez said. "When Barnaby saw all the homes that were destroyed he was immediately concerned that they [the Haitian children] wouldn't have any toys." Barnaby's mother, Timoney Hernandez, helped him collect a bag of his own toys and, combined with the bag from the Castlemans, sent them to Haiti with her husband.

"I wanted to give them [his toys] away," Barnaby said, "because the houses had crushed on (sic) their toys."

The giving didn't stop there. When Barnaby talked about it in school, a neighbor's daughter decided to part with some toys as well. Other families in base housing at Hurlburt Field are getting in on the act as well, Timoney Hernandez said, and she expects more shipments of toys to be heading to Haiti soon.

"It's a small contribution compared to what people are doing down there," Thea Castleman said, "but we are doing what we can to help."