Life has always been very fragile in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, but no country, regardless of how rich or how poor, can possibly hope to recover from a disaster of this magnitude without an enormous amount of help from caring people all around the world.

What is urgently needed now is money for temporary shelters, food, water, and medical care for the most severely injured and disabled.

While government and private agencies debate over the numbers, thousands of unidentified bodies continue to be heaped into plain, unmarked graves. The death toll appears to exceed a quarter of a million men, women and children. Homeless people number well over one and a quarter million, with thousands of them new amputees. The financial damage caused by this catastrophe has been estimated by the Inter-American Development Bank at over fourteen billion dollars. The volume of the rubble is said to equal twenty five times that of the World Trade Center. Its removal will take more than one thousand trucks, working continually for over one thousand days. Recovery efforts have been further complicated by nearly 7,000 violent criminals who escaped when their prison walls collapsed. Very few wars have had as devastating an effect on civilian populations as has this disaster.

With overwhelming death and destruction all around them, brave survivors struggle every day and night to try to make sense of all that has happened, and to repair and rebuild what remains of their desperately shattered lives, their demolished homes, and their devastated communities filled with the sick and injured.

It has been said that difficult times bring out the best and worst in people, and nowhere is that more apparent than it is today in Haiti.