Devastation in Haiti
(c) Paul Tong

After the terrible earthquake, a man named Steve Driscoll went to Haiti with his search dog.

Driscoll is a Palm Beach County, Fla., firefighter, and his dog is a border collie named Blaze. Last week they were working with a Miami-Dade search crew in Port-au-Prince when Blaze started barking and pawing at a concrete wall. Workers made a hole and pulled out a 2-year-old girl, covered in dust but still alive. Six days she had survived in an air pocket beneath the rubble.

Members of the rescue crew could hardly believe it, and there were tears. Driscoll and Blaze got written up in his hometown newspaper, the Palm Beach Post, which is where I read about them.

Many stories about the tragedy in Haiti don't have happy endings and, as the long days pass, more of us will turn away from the news. This is human nature. Scenes of such total devastation and heartbreaking loss of life carry a weight that becomes difficult to bear, even from far away.

The situation in Haiti is not incomprehensible, and it's not indescribable -- just the opposite. A graphic rendition of hell is what it is, a nightmare of nightmares.

Officials still don't know how many people died in the earthquake, and they'll never know. The current estimates range from 50,000 to 200,000, but it's all grim guesswork. Nobody is keeping count of all the bodies being trucked to mass gravesites. Beneath the debris are thousands more, lost forever.

Those who survived are in dire peril. The healthy are desperate for food and water; the injured are desperate for medical care.

Despite the huge international relief effort, some clinics are operating at primitive levels. The New York Times reports that surgical instruments are being sterilized with vodka, and ordinary hacksaws are being used to perform emergency amputations.

If the quake had struck a developed country, the destruction would have been crippling. But in a place of such wretched poverty as Haiti, with a government that barely functions in the best of times, the disaster is magnified to cataclysmic dimensions.

Back here in the States, we all know friends and relatives who can't watch any more of it on television -- and not because they don't care. There's just too much misery to absorb. They feel sad and sickened and helpless to do anything. Diversions are plentiful and, some might argue, therapeutic. If you tuned in to other recent news, you would have learned that Simon Cowell is leaving "American Idol" and, for $32 million, Conan O'Brien is leaving "The Tonight Show." Meanwhile, Tiger Woods is laying low at a clinic for sex addicts in Hattiesburg, Miss., of all places. Or so says the National Enquirer.

And, apparently inspired by home-run slugger Mark McGwire's overdue admission of being a steroid juicer, former Democratic presidential contender John Edwards finally confessed that he fathered a mistress's child.

None of this stuff is very important, but it definitely gives a brain some downtime. Those who are strong enough to stick with the Haiti story will find daily flashes of hope, like the amazing rescue that happened because of Steve Driscoll and his dog.

In the earthquake zone, heroes are abundant and tireless. Just as there's no way to count the dead, there's no way to know how many lives have been saved -- or will be saved, as long as the rest of the world remains riveted.

According to Partners in Health, which has provided medical care in Haiti for almost 25 years, the operating rooms at the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince have been ruled structurally safe and will start taking patients. Trauma surgery is being performed at seven other emergency operating tables on the property, and a helicopter pad has been opened to fly in the most seriously injured.

The very images that are so painful for us to watch are fueling an astounding flow of donations to the many relief agencies on the ground -- UNICEF, the Red Cross, Partners in Health, Doctors Without Borders and others.

People on the outside passionately want to help, and giving money is the swiftest, most effective way. How long it continues at this extraordinary pace will depend on the media's fluttery attention span, and on the public's endurance for what will be an arduous rebuilding.

In a 24/7 news cycle, the coverage of every natural calamity, from hurricanes to tsunamis, reaches a saturation point at which a sort of cauterizing numbness sets in. Nothing would be worse for Haiti.

To glance away from its horrors is understandable, but to lose interest would be ruinous.

Haiti - Sometimes the Earth is Cruel
Leonard Pitts Jr

That is ultimately the fundamental lesson here, as children wail, families sleep out of doors, and the dead lie unclaimed in the rubble that once was Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Haiti - Tragedy and Opportunity for Haiti
Kara C. McDonald

The January 12 earthquake that devastated Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, is the first test of the Obama administration's ability to mount a full-scale international disaster response, and it is no ordinary test. Haiti is the poorest nation in the hemisphere, with abysmal infrastructure, struggling to stabilize

 

(C) 2010 Carl Hiaasen