“It’s been one year since that massive earthquake that killed over 230-thousand people in Haiti. One year later, it looks like little has changed. Hundreds of thousands are still living in tent cities…in squalor…”

Wow.

This was one of the worst natural disasters in human history. Millions of people affected. An entire nation shaken. The world captivated. And there was barely a mention on the anniversary. But, I think, perhaps what disappoints me most is the stories they missed. They missed the progress that’s been made. They missed the lives transformed. They missed the Church stepping up and being the Church in Haiti. They missed organizations like Compassion International making a difference. And, perhaps, most importantly, they missed the story of hope.

One year after the quake, they missed hope.

Odd, I think, because I saw it just one week after the quake. And I saw it…in children.

I saw it in the two little giggly girls who hugged each other as I took a photo. They were living in a tent city, sleeping under a tarp at night, praying it wouldn’t rain. Mommy and daddy lost almost everything. How were they going to feed these precious girls? How were they going to find another home? How were they going to survive? Yet when I entered this tent city, I was overcome by the sound of their laughter as they played. Hope springs up…in these sweet little faces.

I also saw hope in the little boy who shared a drink of water with his little sister.  Daddy was gone. Mommy had little to begin with. She dug through the rubble of her tiny rented home to find some clothes and cooking pots. She would be literally starting over…with no job. No home. No other belongings. Even the bottle of water was donated. This little boy was doing what Haitians do…he was sharing what he had. I find hope in that.

And I found hope in the little boy who, now living on the streets, managed to entertain himself by crafting a kite out of some plastic he found in the trash…and a few pieces of string. I admired his kite for a moment, watching him play with it in the roadway. I clicked a few photos. Then, he offered it to me.

“He wants to know if you want it,” my translator said.

“No, no,” I replied, a bit surprised by the offer, “I just want him to know that I admire it.”

The ingenuity. The resourcefulness. The generosity. His only toy…and he offered it to me.

Yeah, I think the networks missed the story last night. But I’m glad there are organizations like Compassion that build their entire ministry on hope. They know how to instill hope…to feed it…nurture it.  And, like I did on my trip to Haiti, Compassion sees that hope…in its children.

But my trip to Haiti was different. The stories of hope weren’t as evident. Instead of going out and hearing stories of rebuilding and joy, I sat at our hotel and read reports of political unrest on CNN. By the end of that first day, I felt restless and unsettled.

I needed to see hope.

I prowled our hotel grounds looking for it. But all I found was soggy political fliers and deflated Christmas decorations. I peered through the gates, but all I saw was a group of women and children sitting on the low cement wall that surrounded the tent city across the street.

Hope wasn’t as easy for me to find in Haiti as I had anticipated. But I did eventually find it.

I found hope in the Compassion employee and his wife who are moving to Haiti this month to help oversee the rebuilding process. I saw it in his joy, and his love for the Haitian people. I saw it in the Creole he spoke to the hotel staff and the private jokes they shared that the rest of us couldn’t understand. In his willingness to uproot his life and live in a city he loves. In a country that feels forgotten, he remembered.

I found hope in the dining room of our hotel, where people from all over the country had come to continue with the rebuilding of Haiti. I met a geologist who was helping with building codes to protect Haiti from future disasters. A group from a relief agency in England. They hadn’t given up on Haiti. They were committed to restoration.

I found hope one afternoon as a young man unrolled his paintings at the hotel gate. Like hundreds of Haitians, he had lost his arm in the earthquake. This painter lost his right arm. He could have given up. But he didn’t. He taught himself to paint with his left hand, and I saw hope in the canvases spread across the sidewalk.

And as we left Haiti the end of that week, I found a sliver of that hope in myself. I found it in my sadness for those we were leaving behind. And I found it in the realization that one day, I would like to come back.

Me. The girl who never wanted to go to Haiti. Would like to come back.

Haitian hope must be contagious.

Can you briefly summarize Compassion’s strategies in Haiti?

How is Compassion’s work moving forward in an environment of cultural disarray and unrest?

How does Compassion’s disaster response differ from that of other groups?

How are Compassion-assisted mothers, babies, children and students doing?

Is there hope for Haiti and what role does the church play in encouraging that hope?

 In the complete darkness, I can’t see a thing.

The dust in my nose prevents me from smelling anything but concrete. I rub my arms and feel flecks of dust and debris sticking to the hairs. Wiping debris off my face, I can feel a paste where dust mixed with sweat. My body feels weak and broken.

The fine powder collects on my eyelids, making them feel heavy. It would be easy to just close my eyes and drift off — to sleep, to death. But one thought keeps me awake and motivated: I have to live so I can get back to my family.

How will my wife, Christy, react when she finds out I am buried in Haiti? It turns my stomach to think about her and the boys learning about the quake. I need a place to rest and think about what to do next, but the elevator floor I’m sitting on is covered in jagged blocks of concrete and debris. I try to extend my legs, but the car is too small for my six-foot frame, and my feet touch the opposite wall. I try to adjust my body so that I am sitting diagonally to give myself room to stretch. I keep my legs spread apart so my knees don’t touch and cause more pain in my leg wound.

I had hoped that sitting still would diminish the pain, but with each beat of my heart my leg throbs with intense pain. I adjust my balled-up sock, putting it between my head and the wall to keep pressure on my wound. My thick hair feels sticky and warm to the touch — not a good sign. It means my head is still bleeding. I’m getting tired, but I’m afraid to fall asleep.

What if I slip into unconsciousness?

Sleep feels like a significant threat — especially if I have a concussion or drift into shock. Even in the best case, sleep means giving up control of managing my circumstances. I’ve survived an earthquake; I’m not going to die in my sleep. I fumble for my iPhone and set the alarm to go off in twenty minutes. That way, even if I fall asleep, I won’t nap long.

A poem by Dylan Thomas comes to mind. I had read it in college but hadn’t thought of it in years. “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” That’s what I am going to do. I will rage against anything that might keep me from returning to my family.

I take an inventory of my resources: my camera and iPhone, my passport, my journal, and a pen or two. Not much. I wonder if it is even possible to survive. And more importantly, if I don’t, what might happen to my wife, Christy?

Christy had been diagnosed with clinical depression soon after we married. It took nearly six years before we were able to get it under control with therapy and medicine, but since then we’d enjoyed ten years of health and a happy marriage. Yet Christy and I both knew how quickly she could fall back into that black abyss. All it would take was a tragic event, something happening to one of our boys, or the death of one of her parents. With God’s help, we had walked through her sickness together, but one thing we failed to anticipate was that something might happen to me.

Sitting in the darkness, I had to admit — things didn’t look good. I didn’t sleep. I set my alarm again. And again. And yet again. That gave me the chance to assess my situation every twenty minutes. I wasn’t sure I could hold on until rescuers arrived. Even in the worst disasters in the United States, buildings collapsed one or two at a time, not a whole city at a time. When people are trapped, professional rescuers — police, firefighters, and specially trained search and rescue teams — are on the scene in minutes, hours at most. They have trucks, equipment, extensive training, and experience. They have emergency plans, backup plans, and worst-case scenario plans. But I wasn’t in the United States.

I was buried in Haiti — one of the poorest countries in the world — and they had nothing.  I was trapped in the wreckage of my collapsed hotel in an elevator car the size of a small shower. Despite all of that, I knew I was fortunate to be alive. I suspected that my colleague, David, had died instantly. In order to survive, every decision I made had life-and-death consequences, but only one had eternal importance.

 Could I trust God for whatever came next?

In the dark, with my head pressed against the elevator wall, I cried. Not for myself, but for Christy and the boys. What would life be like for them if I died?

It was February 2010. After a week in-country walking through the muck, mire and death from the earthquake, things started to look up. Just simply observing the number of people out and cars on the roads told me that things were starting to move again, that life was stirring and coming back in any way it could. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Even the line at the Canadian Embassy was getting shorter.

 One thing that gave me hope was talking to children in Compassion’s program that were healing. One of those was Leadership Development Program (LDP) student Ferlandie Fadius, 19, who was suffering from post-traumatic stress (I wrote about her in last year’s Hope for Haiti Compassion Magazine). There was a lot to that story, more than the available space in the magazine could fit. Here’s more:

As Port-au-Prince and all of Haiti uncovers itself from the rubble, Ferlandie is still seriously grappling with the horror of being covered up by the body of her dead cousin and a mass of concrete when the earthquake hit. Her road to recovery will not be easy. And there can be no shortcuts.

 I am still curious about how Ferlandie was rescued, so we arrange to go to her collapsed home. She and her mother agree to take us there, but we are concerned that it will trigger too many painful emotions, so we take separate cars.

 It’s hot. We scramble onto the rubble. A small crowd gathers. The stench from the ten bodies still trapped underneath the pile becomes so bracingly bad that our driver leaves and vomits. Everyone else has taken their shirts and put them over their mouths as a sort of shield. But it doesn’t work.

 A boy emerges from the crowd. In broken French, I ask him who he is.

 “I rescued Ferlandie,” he says. He is Jean Marie Brice, a neighbor who runs a small sundries shop out of his home just around the corner. He used to sell her soap, he tells us.

 “I was walking up the street when the quake hit, and after everything settled down, me and some friends heard people inside this pile of rubble,” he says, pointing to Ferlandie’s former home. “It was hard to get to her. She was deep inside.”

 Brice takes us to the site, telling us how he and his friends worked as a team that night to break apart the concrete slabs with hammers and tools they had rummaged from the area.

 “Each hit on the concrete reverberated throughout my whole head and body,” Ferlandie tells us later. “I asked God to give me strength, and I had enough to cry out.”

 The cries compelled Brice and his friends to keep working. It took them over three hours of hard-core pounding on the concrete to break enough of it away to finally reveal a face.

 We jettison the French. Our driver, Jeannot Chataign, 33, a Compassion Haiti tour specialist, takes over for us. “The rescuers thought her cousin was Ferlandie,” he says. “Ferlandie had to tell them that no, that was her dead cousin, and that she was underneath her.”

 Finally, near midnight, Brice and the others pull Ferlandie from underneath her cousin. “If it were not for her cousin’s body being on top of her to cushion the blows,” Brice says grimly, “Ferlandie would have died.”

 Her story does its own reverberating in our minds. We are impressed that she is doing as well as she is, and optimistic that she and other LDP students like her can regroup and become the change agents that Haiti is obviously going to need.

 Two days later, just as we are leaving to fly back to America, Ferlandie walks into the Compassion office. She is smiling. “I do not know why I am alive and my sister and cousin are dead,” she says. “I know there must be a reason. I don’t know what it is, but God does.”

 This is the raw faith that caught the eye of the LDP student selection committee, and it is the faith that will sustain her. “I feel speechless about how much Compassion has done for me,” she says as we leave to catch our flight home. Ferlandie is the last Compassion child we see before we leave Haiti.

 Fast forward to September, 2010.  A shrill whistle jars me awake. It’s coming from the street outside my spartan Port-au-Prince hotel room, and it won’t stop. In a fog from two days of travel to get here in the dark and rain the night before, and already nota fan of how this pre-dawn traffic cop rolls, I throw open the curtains only to be confronted by the sight of a jam-packed tent city directly across the street, a scant 20 yards from me. In plain view, an elderly woman stoops over a bucket of murky water, washes the night’s grime from her body and pats herself with a grungy hand cloth. She is standing in the mud. I shake my head in disbelief. We are so close. But we are so far, far apart. “It doesn’t sound like much has changed down there,” friends and colleagues tell me before my return to Haiti.

 Perhaps not. But somewhere on this trip I ask about Ferlandie, and I learn she is doing well. That’s all I need to know: if she is doing well then what Compassion is doing is working. Looking at the woman washing herself in the tent camp across from my room, it’s  hard to imagine that Haiti can come back stronger than before, like some believe. But looking inside Compassion projects and the hearts of those Compassion-assisted children affected by what happened on January 12, that’s an entirely different story.

They groaned as they sat up on their dirt or cement floors. Lucky ones had a mattress or some sort of mat to sleep on. There was no walking into the kitchen for a cup of coffee. For most, the kitchen is also the bedroom…and the living room. There was no coffee pot set to go off to start the morning. That’s a luxury most Haitians cannot afford.

Many went without breakfast that morning one year ago today. For hundreds of thousands, they were up before the sun so they could make their way to the streets to look for work—anything to make a dollar or two to feed the family. They’d slip on their dirty shoes, splash water on their face—not from a faucet, but a bucket or barrel sitting outside their house of cinder blocks and tin. Some, no doubt, prayed—thanking God for another day. Others simply asked God to please help them find food to fill their aching, empty bellies.

Children were up early.

Not playing with toys but getting dressed to make the one- or two-mile walk to school. Others, who couldn’t afford an education, were preparing to make their way to the same streets to beg or sell something for a little change.

By all our westernized accounts, Haitians didn’t have it so good one year ago this morning. And yet, a dark disaster was still looming.

None of them knew what the day would bring. No one foretold the horrendous shaking of the earth that would bring death to nearly every neighborhood, every street in Port-au-Prince.

It was a normal, depressing, disappointing day.

The true disaster in Haiti is that we, as human beings—we, the Church—allow suffering like this in our world and hardly ever think of it. I include myself in that. They aren’t on our minds until an earthquake, tsunami, hurricane or other disaster hits. Never realizing that for billions of people in this world, life itself is a daily disaster.

I wonder what would have happened if the hundreds of millions of dollars that poured into Haiti after the earthquake had been there before any tragedy. What if we saw poverty as an equally horrible disaster and decided to conduct massive campaigns to respond to it?

Surely, there would have been some political corruption to snatch away some of the monies, but what would hundreds of millions of dollars have done to the Haitian economy? Would it have built houses that can withstand a 7.0 earthquake? Would it have protected churches, schools and government buildings? Would it have made sure that there were no empty, aching bellies praying for food on the morning of January 12, 2010?

I love that we respond to disasters like the earthquake in Haiti. I think it’s a glimmer of hope in mankind—that we can still care enough to meet a need. I just wish we saw poverty as the disaster it is.

Every two weeks, we lose the same number of children around the world as the number of people killed in the Haiti earthquake.

Every two weeks. And almost every one of them dies due to a preventable cause—malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria. Is that not disaster enough for us to respond?

Don’t get me wrong. I think the Church has made incredible strides in responding to poverty. And, I believe, the Church is the answer to ending extreme poverty. I just hope we can find a way to see the disaster before the disaster.

She entered the house first and put her youngest daughter on the floor. Her house was small — smaller than a standard kitchen in the United States. It was made with the common elements of most Haitian slum houses, concrete blocks and a scavenged corrugated metal roof. It was designed to protect them from the elements and their most-feared natural disaster — a hurricane.

The two oldest daughters faced challenges because of Missoul’s malnutrition and lack of health care during her pregnancies. I knew that Missoul had also lost a baby during a previous pregnancy, and I wondered if I dared ask her about that loss. During Missoul’s fourth pregnancy, Compassion … invited her to become a part of the program at Pastor Yves’s church, which ensured she had proper nutrition and medical care both during her pregnancy and after the birth of her third daughter, Micheleine.

David unpacked his bags and set up the tripod, lights, and camera. He filmed Missoul as she described her life before and after Compassion’s involvement. Not only were there improvements with her physical well-being; there were also spiritual changes. Though she continued to work as hard as she always had, now that she was a follower of Christ she had new hope for her life and for her family.

Missoul’s face had a weathered look. It was hard to tell how old she was, but it was easy to see she had endured many hardships in her life. Her face was intense, almost hard, but the lines softened and melted away when she smiled, which she did rarely for strangers but often for her children.

After Micheleine’s birth, Compassion’s care through the church continued — teaching her proper child care and making it possible for her baby to be vaccinated. In Haiti, something as simple as a vaccination can change the trajectory of a child’s life. Good health provides a distinct advantage for a future that can include education and an opportunity to find meaningful work. Because of early intervention, this toddler now had the potential to lift the whole family out of poverty.

“We got it, David — we got the story!” I said.

Anything else we get on this trip is gravy,” I said once we were back in the SUV. We still had another mother to interview the next day, but it felt good knowing that no matter how that turned out, we had gotten what we’d come for.

As I settled in my seat for the thirty-minute ride back to Port-au-Prince, the stress that had nagged me for weeks slipped away. I smiled to think that this was how God was choosing to use me right now, and I couldn’t think of a better way to live out my faith. I hoped Missoul’s story would impact others as much as it had me.

On the ride back to the hotel, I called my wife, Christy. Things have always been tight for us financially. Working at a nonprofit doesn’t pay as well as a corporate job, so together we started a small Internet-based business. We depended on advertisers’ checks to help pay our bills. I needed Christy to pick up one of those checks and deposit it before the bank closed, so it would clear in time to pay bills due at the end of the week. She answered on the first ring. “Hi, honey. How was your day? Did you get the check picked up and deposited?”

“Yeah, I did it this morning.” She talked about the kids and her plans for the day. “I won’t go into all the details. I’ll save that for when you get back. How do you like Haiti?”

“I wish you were here with me to experience this and meet the people. Haiti is a tropical paradise buried under poverty… David and I are headed back to the hotel. We’re pretty tired, so we’ll probably lie down for a few minutes and get dinner after that.” Christy and I said our good-byes, and I promised to call after dinner when I had more time to talk.

We turned on to the steep and winding one-lane, quarter-mile road that led to the hotel, and several times I caught my breath as our car hugged a tight curve on the edge of a steep drop-off. I could see the shining white columns and the layered terraces that glimmered in the late afternoon sun as they clung to the side of the Hotel Montana.

The open-air lobby, shaded portico, and tropical colors of the building were a welcome relief from the bleak architecture we’d passed on our way in. Ephraim pulled into the roundabout in front of the hotel, put the SUV in park, and cut the engine. He opened the door, and as we exited the SUV, he first grabbed David, and then me, in a bear hug.

I glanced at my watch. It was 4:52.

As we entered the lobby, the registration desk was directly ahead of us. The white pillars and colonnades reflected the bright afternoon sun, making the whole lobby area radiate with warmth and light. We turned left at the registration desk and headed toward the small elevators but at the last second decided to turn our backs to the lobby and instead take the outdoor stairway that led to our room. It would give us a chance to breathe in the warm Caribbean air and get one more look at the panoramic view.

We had only taken a step or two in the direction of the stairs when a boom shook the hotel like a fierce thunderclap might shake a house, but instead of windows rattling, the walls rippled as if they were made of liquid. I’m not sure I heard the boom so much as I felt it in my chest. The explosions continued one on top of another, near and far away, like the sounds of artillery on a battlefield.

To be continued.

For more information on Dan’s book, please go to www.danwoolley.net

They know, perhaps better than anyone, that ignoring pain doesn’t make it go away. Shifting the conversation to something more appropriate, something more comfortable, helps no one.

On Monday I spent a few hours listening to testimonies of Compassion-sponsored children, teens, and staff who had suffered injuries and lost parents in January’s earthquake.

I heard stories of children who were trapped and despairing of rescue. Stories of teens watching their siblings and parents die. I met a three-year-old who, as a twenty-four-month old toddler, had his arm crushed by a wall and then amputated (could you imagine?). One twenty-something stood up and told of losing his mother and fiancé, the two most important women in his life, in one fateful minute on January 12.

They were hard stories to hear. Some brought back memories of my own tough experience in the earthquake.  Most reminded me how minor my suffering was compared with the suffering of these kids, these teens, and all the people of Haiti.

But there were messages of hope as well. With every story our Haitian brothers and sisters talked of God’s place with them in suffering.

“If you are alive today because of God, don’t give up. He has a plan for you.”

And “This has been my year of suffering, but God knows. God knows. Suffering is just part of the package.”

And “Today we celebrate life! Take a deep breath. How did that feel? It feels good, doesn’t it? We’re still alive, and that is worth celebrating. Thanks be to God, and hallelujah for Haiti!”

And “The Lord heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. Haiti will not perish.”

I held it together during most of the service. I certainly shed some tears during some of the stories, but overall held my composure. Not that there’s anything wrong with crying, but I didn’t want my blubbering to distract people from the matter at hand. I had distracted enough attention for the day.

But then, right when I thought I’d spare these folks a messy crying scene, a young teen stood up to sing. And before he sang, he said these nine simple words that undid me.

“I lost my mother. She was all to me.”

As he launched into a passionate, beautiful, all-heart rendition of “Hallelujah, I Have Jesus,” my tears started to flow. Music is made richer by experience with pain, and the depth expressed in song by this sweet young boy showed suffering beyond his years. Yet the overall sense was love, hope, and faith. There was even joy in this song. Faith in Jesus was not a casual experience for him, it was his very breath. And I’ve seen this everywhere I look this week.

Hope for our friends in Haiti doesn’t mean pretending the hard stuff isn’t happening. Hope for Haitians comes from true, trial-tested faith in God’s promises, faith in Scriptural truth, a real expectation that someday suffering will end, and a breath-by-breath reliance on God’s love.

Do you want a faith like that? I know I do. We could learn a lot from our Haitian brothers and sisters. Please continue to pray for Haiti.

Watch a bad cellphone video of his song.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti. January 12, 2010 9:15 a.m. (EST)

“Good morning, Dan,” Ephraim said as the SUV rolled to a stop in front of our hotel. “Are you ready to go to the church?”

“I’m ready and excited,” I said as I helped David, the videographer for this trip, load our gear into the back of the car.

I had corresponded with Ephraim for several months planning this trip to Haiti, so I wasn’t surprised when I found him waiting for us at the airport when we arrived on Monday. I immediately recognized his smile beaming out from underneath his straw hat with the bright tropical print on the band. After loading our luggage into his SUV, Ephraim took us to the Compassion International office inPort-au-Prince, where we spent the day with the local staff.

As I climbed in behind David, and settled in my seat, Ephraim’s ebullient spirit seemed to overflow the SUV. I looked forward to the day’s events — visiting a new Compassion program at a church just outside of the city and then making a home visit to one of the moms who participated in the program.

As we drove up to the church and parked in the dirt lot next to it, I noticed the drab exterior of the one-story concrete building. I wondered what we’d find inside. We all exited the SUV eager to get started. Ephraim pushed his door shut, and the SUV rocked. Though his size may have been intimidating, his spirit wasn’t. An inner joy danced across his face as he explained the program we would soon see inside the church.

“I’ll introduce you to the pastor first,” he said as he took off toward the front door. With his long strides, there was no point in trying to keep up with him. Ephraim had an undeniable sense of urgency about Compassion’s work. Whenever he spoke about the difficulty of life in Haiti, he also talked about the difference Compassion was making for mothers and their children trapped in poverty.  I helped David grab the video camera and other equipment from the back of the SUV, and we hurried to catch up to Ephraim.

“Let’s review what you want to accomplish today,” David said as we walked.

“We need video that captures the Child Survival Program in action. I believe if people can see what Compassion is doing here, they’ll want to support the ministry.”

Though Compassion is perhaps best known for their child sponsorship programs — where donors form one-on-one relationships with their sponsored children through exchanging letters — in the past few years, new programs like the Child Survival Program were already making a huge impact. As one of Compassion’s website developers, I was excited to highlight these new programs online so our donors could see the impact their donations were having.

“Most donors will never get within three hundred miles of the poverty in Haiti, but if they can watch a video on their computer that gets them even three steps closer to a mom who lives it every day,then we will have done our job well,” I said.

Opening the creaky wooden door, I stepped right into the church sanctuary, where forty moms with babies and young children were waving their arms, singing, and clapping in time with the Creole rhythms.

“Thank you for coming,” Pastor Yves said, giving me a hug. He didn’t speak English so Johnnie translated for him. “We’re glad you are here to tell our story.” I hoped I could.

A lot was riding on this, and I felt the weight of the responsibility. I glanced over at David and watched as he studied the room, looking for natural sources of light. Once he found the right spot, he carefully set down his bags, opened the tripod, and adjusted it to the right height. Next he unpacked his gear, put batteries in the video camera and mics, and inserted a fresh tape. He checked the audio level and adjusted the settings, then nodded to let me know he was ready.

To be continued.

For more information on Dan’s book, please go to www.danwoolley.net

[Continued from "First Glimpse."]

The plane rolled to a stop.

I jumped out, grabbed my duffle bag from the belly of the plane and trotted across the tarmac, dodging U.S. Army jeeps ferrying around supplies and soldiers headed to the makeshift barracks or out on patrol. Helicopters battered the air above me, whoosh! whoosh! whoosh!

A massive, deafening roar blasted out of the engines the U.S. Air Force C17 “Charleston” as it backed up not more than 20 feet from me. I could see the pilot high above in the cockpit. I waved. He waved back.

I made my way to “customs” (a wooden desk parked in a doorway of what was left of the airport terminal) and plunked down my passport. Stamp! I was in. No questions, no nothing. Just get going. I jumped into the back of a pickup truck with Allan and Compassion’s International Area Director for the Caribbean and Central Americas Region Doug Bassett (whose own story of getting to Haiti was nothing short of gripping) for a ride up to the Compassion office.

As the wind blew in our face and tussled our hair, I strained to hear Doug giving me a blow-by-blow account of what he had seen in the hours after the earthquake. It was not for the faint of heart.

“One Compassion staff, a driver, had his daughter trapped under the rubble.”

“He was with her, speaking to her, heard her pleading for help, but was unable to do anything to get her out. She died. We could see his anguish when he came to work.” I winced. He went on.

“Another staff member, an accountant, came and told us that his young daughter had had a wall fall on her and kill her,” he said, tearing up. “He shared what had happened and for us, we caught the pain of that moment. Many of us who have children could really feel what had happened. It’s through the stories of those two that I most understood what happened.”

As I looked around from the back of the pickup, not much had changed from the desolation he was describing. Doug kept talking. I kept listening. And all around us death and destruction crowded in on, underscoring that yes, it really was as bad as everyone had said it was.

First order of business after dropping bags at the “Haiti Hilton” (the parking lot at the Compassion office, my new home): go pay my respects at the Hotel Montana, where Dan had been miraculously pulled and David had the day before been officially identified and extracted. I had already talked at length about what had happened there with

Sean Sheridan with a US Soldier at Haiti's Hotel Montana

Doug Bassett and had spoken with the pair’s driver, Ephraim, peppering him with questions about what exactly had happened as he turned from them and walked out of the hotel seconds before the quake hit. I had read Tim Glenn’s accounts of being there.

And now it was my turn to see it with my own eyes.

Although it was heavily guarded by members of the U.S. Army’s First Airborne Division, just taking a quick look through the gate was enough, a sobering moment that will remain etched in my memory like flying into Port-au-Prince earlier that day had been.

One of the things that few people know about me is that I cannot smell. Literally. I am a clinical anosmiac, or without smell. So I was curious if I would have a reaction to the stench that I knew existed everywhere: death.

When I walked onto pancaked buildings and watched others vomit from the stench, my reaction was to hold my breath. I couldn’t smell what the others were, but I sure could feel it in my lungs. It was that thick. And it wasn’t going to go away any time soon, either—there was just no way to excavate that many trapped bodies, no way to dig them out.

The only thing that offered any relief for people living next to the deathtraps was to pour gas and oil into the cracks and torch it. I know this sounds cruel, but what else could you do? One day I asked Ricot, my driver, to let me out on a street that was particularly devastated. I walked over to a hotel that had crunched down and flattened the first floor and was leaning like the Tower of Pisa. On a large piece of rubble was a blackened skull. I looked under the first-floor rubble and saw the rest of the poor headless soul. The attempt to burn the body was only partly successful. I moved on quietly.

The week was filled with walking through devastated areas and speaking with Compassion children and families who had been severely affected by the earthquake. It was a surreal experience. I took many photographs and wrote a great deal, often by flashlight in my tent at night. I worked hard. I slept little, wondering if aftershocks would bring the Compassion office or the wall in the parking lot that was just feet from my sleeping bag down on me.

Across the street hundreds of people camped out nightly in front of the Canadian Embassy hoping to get inside each morning and get a ticket out of the country. It was hot. The place was a disaster, completely messed up. Yes, it really was as bad as they said it was, and all of us would say it was the worst thing we had ever seen in our careers. And I couldn’t get out of my mind that I was, still, exactly where I was supposed to be, developing stories that I knew would make a difference when read in the magazine or on blogs back home. How could it not?

There really was no place for this country to go but up.