One Thing Back on Track in Haiti: Mourning

As the shock over the inconceivable 230,000 lost in the Haitian earthquake begins to subside, survivors have begun to shift to mourning individuals—from teachers to tax collectors, schoolchildren to elderly priests, brothers to sons. As the New York Times reports, the police chief whose daughters died on the same day that 5,000 prisoners were freed by the earthquake is just beginning to come to terms.

“Justice undone, children gone, innocence destroyed,” he tells the Times. “I mourn it all.” Funerals are picking up again after a month of numbness, but something else is gone that will be harder to memorialize. "It is hard to focus on any one individual," a mourner says, "because the country lost the country.” (More Haiti stories.)