Haiti

Hundreds of Navy personnel have disembarked from the hospital ship USNS Comfort in Norfolk, Va., as it returns from a seven-week mission treating earthquake victims in Haiti. The hospital ship arrived at Naval Station Norfolk on Saturday. It's scheduled to leave Thursday and arrive at its home port in Baltimore on Friday. Navy officials say 500 of the ship's 700 personnel disembarked over the weekend. - Associated Press

The hospital ship USNS Comfort left Port-au-Prince harbor Tuesday night to begin a five-day sail back to Baltimore, its Navy commanders having determined - against the advice of some civilian doctors on the ground - that the floating medical center is no longer needed in earthquake-damaged Haiti. Pentagon officials say they made the decision to recall the 1,000-bed hospital, which arrived in Haiti Jan. 20, after "determining her crew completed the humanitarian relief mission it was directed to conduct."

The Navy hospital ship Comfort discharged its last remaining patient last weekend and is anchored in Port-au-Prince harbor, empty but for its 993- member crew, waiting for military leaders to decide whether it still has a role in the U.S. response to January's deadly earthquake in Haiti. Pentagon officials won't say what the ship's next step is. But as signs mount that the floating medical center is preparing to leave Haiti six weeks after it arrived, so is the clamor rising from doctors on the ground in the battered country who say earthquake victims still need the Comfort's equipment and skills.

Crystal Palace Baltimore of the USSF D2 Pro League will face Loyola University at 7 p.m. next Wednesday in a preseason exhibition that will raise money for Haitian earthquake relief charities. The match will be the first played at the college's new Ridley Stadium Athletic Complex, at 2221 W. Cold Spring Lane. Admission is free; donations will be accepted by the school's Hounds for Haiti organization, which will forward all funds directly to Catholic Relief Services. More colleges: Navy senior Mark Van Orden was named Patriot League Men's Indoor Track Scholar-Athlete of the Year for the second-straight winter.

Locally based relief agencies are weighing what they might do to help victims of the earthquake in Chile, but said Monday that they had no plans to shift their principal focus from long-term recovery efforts in Haiti. While the 8.8-magnitude quake that struck Chile early Saturday was stronger than the one that rocked Haiti in January, Lutheran World Relief's Hayley Hontos said, the South American nation is unlikely to require nearly as much support. "Chile is Latin America's most developed country and they're highly capable of dealing with a situation like this," said Hontos, special projects coordinator for the Baltimore-based agency.

One of the biggest earthquakes in recorded history rocked Chile on Saturday, killing more than 300 people, toppling buildings and freeways, and setting off sirens thousands of miles away as governments scrambled to protect coastal residents from the ensuing tsunami. Chilean President Michelle Bachelet declared parts of the country "catastrophe zones" in the wake of the magnitude-8.8 quake, which was centered about 70 miles offshore from the port city of Concepcion. With images of Haiti's devastation from an earthquake last month still fresh, the world woke up to new disaster and fears of another catastrophic toll.

S o overwhelmed was Nadege Marc after viewing news coverage of the earthquake in Haiti that she couldn't even begin to face the prospect of seeing firsthand what she calls "the circle of death." A shadow fell over Marc's face as she described watching footage of the blanket-covered heaps of corpses on sidewalks and the mass graves of unidentified bodies. Yet the Veterans Elementary School teacher, who organized a fundraiser among students and staff, said she expects to summon the courage to head to the Caribbean country in the not-too-distant future.

Dana Kollmann examines ancient skulls on the weekends, teaches anthropology during the week, and her four young children can sum up their mother's passion in three words: "Mama studies bones." Today, the Towson University professor leaves for Haiti for the somber task of identifying the remains of at least 100 Americans believed to have perished in last month's devastating earthquake. As a member of the federal government's Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams, known as DMORTs, she's one of a group of 30 professionals, including coroners and forensic dentists, who process, identify and prepare the remains of disaster victims for burial.

Makayla Gilliam-Price woke on Jan. 13 to see television images of the earthquake that had devastated Haiti the evening before, and the 11-year-old was overwhelmed by the pictures of destruction and suffering. "I remember waking up and seeing all these terrible pictures and seeing people crying and screaming and thinking that if I were in the situation, I would want every single person in the world to help me, and I need them fast," said the Calvert School middle-schooler. So she came up with the idea of making and selling beaded bracelets to raise money to send to the suffering people of Haiti.

I n Haiti, Focus on the Basics I recently returned to my family in Silver Spring after spending 55 hours trapped in the rubble of the collapsed Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The intense emotions I felt while waiting for help, and those I experienced as I heard that two colleagues did not make it, still pale in comparison to what I felt when I was on the way to the U.S. Embassy after being pulled from the hotel rubble. The scale of destruction was truly heartbreaking.