The Moment

Faith, hope and charity all somehow survived the first days of Haiti's agony. But dignity was among the first to die. There was no time or means to keep it alive once the Haitian capital was turned inside out by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake, the living tossed from their homes to commune with the dead in the streets. In the days following the quake, corpses had to be collected in wheelbarrows and shopping carts; at the city's Grand Cimetière, with its elegant tombs, chickens pecked at bodies stacked along the central path, left by families who couldn't afford a burial. Other remains were loaded by bulldozer into dump trucks and hauled away to mass burials in the cursed swamplands outside the city. Everywhere were funeral pyres, fueled by wood crates or old tires, set alight by people who had given up hope that the government would come to clear the corpses. Passersby, hit by the heat and stench, broke into a run; some images just burn too deep.