Richard Lopez is a humble man. It's trips like the one he recently took to Haiti that make him so.

Lopez, engineering and operations manager for Socorro Electric Cooperative, returned from a two-week trip to earthquake-ravaged Haiti on March 9. He was there as part of a National Rural Electric Cooperative Association organized effort to help restore power to the country hit hard by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Jan. 12. An estimated 225,000 people died in the quake, which injured another 300,000 and left 1 million people homeless.

Many of the buildings in the capital city of Port-au-Prince crumbled and the country's infrastructure was left in shambles.

"When I got there, they only had a handful of circuits that were energized," said Lopez, who arrived in Haiti on Feb. 24, six weeks after the quake struck. "When I left, 24 of 33 distribution circuits were energized — 19 of them partially and five of them fully ... They were at about 20 percent power when I got there, and about 70 percent when I left, so I feel good about that."

Lopez said restoration efforts made a lot of progress while he was there because all nine of the country's substations were up and running by the time he got there.

"So I had something to work with," he said. "What was still standing, we attempted to get power to it. We started with factories and then went on to industrial and large commercial business, so people could get back to work. Then we did the residential."

Lopez said he worked 10-12 hours a day every day he was there. His role was as an advisor to 16 crews that made repairs to power lines. He worked alongside the director of distribution and helped coordinate the restoration plan.

"What we'd do is inspect lines and come up with a repair sheet and they'd dispatch a crew to make repairs," explained Lopez, who participated in restoration projects in Honduras and Nicaragua after Hurricane Mitch, in 1998, and helped set up a substation in the Dominican Republic, which shares an island with Haiti, about 10 years ago.

On this trip, Lopez worked closely with personnel from the country's utility company, Electricite d'Haiti, some of whom were among those left homeless by the quake.

"It didn't dawn on me until later that these guys are working so hard to get the power back on and they're living in the streets. They'd sleep in the yard or in their car, if they were lucky," said Lopez, and added that you'd never know it from their demeanor. "As bad as the situation was, they had that Caribbean attitude. They could still joke, despite all the bad stuff going on."

"What worries me is where do they go now?" he continued. "They're living in tent cities, and the monsoon and hurricane seasons are coming up."

Lopez said he didn't have to endure too many hardships himself. He slept in a bed in a hotel. He also ate well — usually an omelet for breakfast, something out of a can for lunch and out to a restaurant for dinner.

For the most part, Lopez said he was able to overcome the language barrier. If English didn't work, Spanish might. He also quickly learned a few key words in the French Creole dialect most commonly spoken by the native population.

While evidence of devastation surrounded him, Lopez said that at times, it was best to look past it.

"You can't start feeling sorry for them; you have to focus on the objective," he said.

A lot of the suffering has subsided, Lopez said, and things aren't as bad as the images CNN broadcast in the aftermath of the quake. He did see one dead body and a few amputees, but not a lot of chaos.

Food distribution lines appeared well organized and military personnel were present to make sure greed didn't get the best of anyone.

Hospitals were operational and staffed with physicians affiliated with Doctors Without Borders.

Although SEC paid his way, Lopez was prepared to make the trip on his own nickel.

"Number one, you want to help wherever you can," he said. "The other thing is it's a great reality check. We often find ourselves complaining about what are really little things. But if you look at it, we're doing better than 98 percent of the people in the world."

Lopez took well over 100 pictures while in Haiti. His favorite is one that he said epitomizes the whole reason he took the trip, and he told the story of how it came about.

"All of a sudden I heard a scream. I went to look and there was this woman and she was dancing and singing — because the light came on on her porch," he said. "I figured it out, and she had been without power for 52 days. Seeing that, that's the reward right there."

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