Sean Penn’s Haitian relief venture

Sean Penn is finding himself in Haiti, said Douglas Brinkley in Vanity Fair. The actor, 49, admits that his life bottomed out last year when he split with his wife of 11 years, Robin Wright. “She’s like a ghost to me now,” Penn says. “We spent all those years together. Now she’s just gone.” He grew more morose when the couple’s son, Hopper, suffered a near-fatal skateboarding accident and just barely pulled through.

Penn says he was emotionally adrift when the devastating 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti in January. “I started tracking the news. I couldn’t fathom the death toll. I saw all those people getting Civil War medicine on TV.” Leaning on his Hollywood connections for financing, he wrangled a DC-4, filled it full of supplies and medicine, and shipped off to Haiti with a team of doctors.

For five months, Penn has been living in a tent while helping to run a relief camp for some 50,000 displaced persons in the town of Pétionville. Helping earthquake victims recover, he says, has given him a newfound sense of purpose, and has helped him recover his sense of the bigger picture: “They’ve given me back something I thought I’d lost—my humility.”

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