Haitians

Friends recall Flores McGarrell as an unforgettable artistic force. A performer at numerous Artscape events, he helped create a live memorial drama after the 1995 burning of the Clipper Mill in Woodberry. His teachers said he was one of the most recognized students at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he studied and taught for nearly a decade. The former Baltimorean, who was leading a Haitian arts center, died Tuesday when he dashed into a collapsing hotel during the earthquake to retrieve a computer that stored his records and artistic concepts.

The Revs. Tracy Bruce and Stephen Davenport travel to Haiti every January to visit the music school in Port-au-Prince, the church in St. Etienne and the other development projects they support in the poorest nation in the Americas. But with the school and the church now destroyed, and no word yet from many of the friends with whom the husband-and-wife Episcopal clergy members have worked over the decades, they expect this month's trip to be different. "There's nothing that's coming out of Haiti at all in terms of communication right now from anybody on the ground," Bruce, rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Glyndon, said Friday.

The woman wailed outside the ruins of Cathedrale de Notre-Dame de Port-au-Prince, the Roman Catholic cathedral that symbolized Haiti's religious fervor. "This is what God did!" she cried Friday morning. "See what God can do!" Tuesday's earthquake brought down the roof of the enormous pink-and-cream cathedral, filling the apse and nave with tons of rubble. The quake punched out its vivid stained-glass windows, twisted its wrought-iron fencing and sliced brick walls like cake. The western steeple, which had soared more than 100 feet in the sky, toppled onto parishioners praying at an outdoor shrine to St. Emmanuel.

- Pushed to the edge of desperation, earthquake-ravaged Haitians dumped bodies into mass graves and begged for water and food Friday amid fear that time is running out to avoid chaos and to rescue anyone still alive in the wreckage. The U.S. military brought some relief, taking control of the airport, helping coordinate flights bringing in aid and evacuating foreigners and the injured. Medical teams, meanwhile, set up makeshift hospitals, workers started to clear the streets of corpses and water was being distributed in pockets of the city.

The horrific images of collapsed buildings and rows of decomposing bodies lying in the streets of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, have left no doubt as to the magnitude of the human catastrophe that occurred there. One of the worst natural disasters this hemisphere has seen in recent memory, the most powerful earthquake to strike Haiti in 200 years, has hit squarely in the nation least able to cope with it. Haiti has long been the poorest nation in the Americas, and years of dictatorship and corruption have made it especially vulnerable to such a calamity and unable to recover on its own. Within hours of Tuesday's quake, President Barack Obama pledged to assist in the massive international relief effort now under way. Owing to Haiti's proximity and the country's long historical ties to America, it's clear the U.S. must take the lead in search-and-rescue operations and in the reconstruction of Haiti's devastated infrastructure.

Madison Smartt Bell loves Haiti, has many close friends there, and initially rose to prominence because of novels he wrote about the impoverished Caribbean nation. So when an earthquake that measured 7.0 on the Richter scale struck a country that has had more than its share of bad luck, Bell was worried, heartbroken - and suddenly in demand as a media expert. As he wrote in the British newspaper The Guardian: "Haitians are expert in survival against all odds. They had been doing it for a century before their nation had a name.

For Julie Strange, helping the victims of a devastating earthquake in Haiti was just a text message away. The 27-year-old Towson librarian read on Twitter of an American Red Cross campaign to raise money for disaster relief in the shattered country through text messaging. Within a few minutes, she made a $10 donation by texting the word "HAITI" to a five-digit number - an act of mobile giving that she's done for other charities for a couple of years now. "It's definitely starting to get a little mainstream now," Strange said.