The flight attendant would ask the question, but already she knew the answer.

More often than not these past two weeks, she knew that the people boarding this 40-minute jaunt from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, were headed somewhere else entirely.

"Are you going to Haiti?" she would ask, brightly, and offer up the sweetest smile to the passengers standing in the doorway.

"Welcome to the Haiti Express," she'd say, and beam that smile and a token of gratitude, over and over.

With the airport in Port-au-Prince experiencing bottlenecks that are delaying the arrival of desperately-needed supplies, relief organizations, missionaries, and others have re-routed their trips through the Dominican Republic. The groups fly into the Dominican and then drive the 100 or so miles to Port-au-Prince — a 5- or 6-hour trip before the earthquake, who knows how long now.

The flight attendant can attest to the dramatic change in destination and intent.

"Two days after the earthquake," she said, "they were coming from all over, even Taiwan. All kinds of priests and nuns, and I couldn't stop crying. We're the Haiti Express."

Three members of Connecticut-based Haitian Ministries rode the Haiti Express on Thursday. Executive director Emily Smack, Development Director Kyn Tolson, The Day's former deputy managing editor, and Dr. Tom Gorin, who's volunteered his work at clinics in the past, are on their way to Port-au-Prince to check on their Haitian partners.

The group's mission house was destroyed in the earthquake, an orphanage they assist with is running low on food and water, and they've lost all their paperwork.

The trio will hire a van and a driver to travel to Port-au-Prince on Friday, bringing all the beans, rice, water and medical supplies they can stuff into the vehicle.

This stop in the Dominican Republic is, well, a little weird. It is impossible not to think otherwise when standing in a market looking at espresso machines, while not that far away — about the distance from New London to Yankee Stadium — a country is destroyed.

In a small grocery store, Tolson tried to tell a store manager she wanted to buy 10 coolers of water. English speakers are scarce here, and finally, after wrestling with the language barrier to no avail, Tolson flagged down a passing customer to serve as a translator.

Juan Moreno Valentin had stopped in to buy cigarettes before a planned afternoon nap. Soon, Valentin and his friend, Helene Tassin, were leading the Haitian Ministries staff in a parade of grocery carts up Duarte Avenue.

Here, you buy an empty water cooler and then take it to be filled at the local equivalent of the Poland Spring store — a doorway in the side of a building that leads to what looks like a small warehouse: "Agua Samaritana."

The parade trekked up a steep hill with the water coolers. When they had been filled and loaded back into the grocery carts, Tolson stood just outside the door, where the carts were temporarily positioned sideways in the road and cheerily announced to the store employee: "Downhill."

"Problema," came the reply.

No problema, really. One in front, one in back, the parade traveled back down the hill and several blocks to the market to finish shopping.

Standing outside the market while the ministries' staff checked out, Tassin and Valentin finally smoked their cigarettes. Each has only lived in the Dominican Republic about three months, Valentin having grown up in New York and Tassin being from Belgium.

She loves it here, Tassin said. But the earthquake in Haiti, yes, she felt it here. It felt like you're getting dizzy, she said, before you realize it isn't you: it's the room. And then a deeper realization hits you in the gut.

"You could feel that it wasn't here," Tassin said.

She paused.

"And wherever it was, it was bad."