Haiti, two months later:

I've known since he died five months ago that I've been incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by ceaselessly, unfailingly kind family and friends and that, also, I'm grieving in a part of the world in which I have access to ample food, clean water, a safe home and freedom of speech. (A large swath of my family lived under Nazi occupation; when my father's mother died when he was six, he had no grief counseling because, indeed, he had no food or shelter.)

So I keep returning to Haiti again and again. Like everyone I know who is in a position to donate to relief efforts, I've done so repeatedly. But I keep thinking of the 1.2 million displaced individuals who are grieving multiple loved ones without privacy or even basic sanitation.

Liesl Gernholtz of Human Rights Watch writes for the Daily Beast on the particular horrors in the quake's aftermath endemic to women, many of whom of have been raped in the resulting breakdown of any infrastructure:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-09/haitis-rape-crisis/

Ian Urbina writes for the New York Times on the particular hardships of Haiti's elderly, who survived both Duvalier regimes and Haiti's continuing AIDS crisis only to face the quake's nearly unfathomable devastation at the end of their lives:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/world/americas/12elderly.html?hp