Not One Stone - by Julie C. Pursell (my mother)

Death came to the Archbishop.

Winnie lived, at 18 months pulled unscathed from crushing concrete.

The presidential palace collapsed. A white shell of rubble had been the national Cathedral.

Terror reigned, nature-made, where so many times not one stone remained upon another.

The poorest of the poor shattered once again, overwhelmingly. Homes and shacks, schools, hospitals, shops and hotels pancaked on hapless young and old as the devastating power of the earth exacted its cruel dominance. Status held no rank. Privileged and improvished shared the same fate.Tectonic plates shifted just below the surface with inexorable force. The ground rolled in waves of decimating precision. Awesome in its finality. It lasted 15 seconds.

Anguished shrieks and stunned disbelief turned a land of contrasts into an abomination of dead and dying, incredible rescues, tent cities without water, makeshift hospitals without anesthesia. Some looted to survive or profit. Others prayed. Nuns perished with their students. Orphans awaiting adoption were airlifted to America. Their eyes were large, dark and blank. Hundreds of thousands still wait, against an avalanche of need and time.Tons of food and medical aid sit on the tarmac, stymied by impassable roads from reaching desparate survivors. In the blackness strangers huddled to sing against the unknown in the long dark night.

There is no normal.

There is no ready answer.

The once-verdant land of Hispanolia, fought over and settled by Spanish and French, their colonial plantations worked by enslaved Africans, split along a massive mountain range. The Dominican Republic occupied two thirds of the island, Haiti one third. French colonial authorities stripped the land of its trees and resources. Slaves rebelled, dispelling the French, while retaining their language, ancient religion and elements of African mystique and culture. Decades of intolerable debt, corrupt despots, destructive hurricanes and political turmoil created the perfect storm. Before the earthquake.

Ironically the cataclysmic disaster leveled Haiti, only sent tremors to its neighbor on the other side of the mountain.

Dominicans responded with aid and relaxed borders. Exiled Haitian dictator "Baby Doc" Duvalier pledged the entire $8 million of his former Haitian treasure trove to his homeland through the International Red Cross. Spearheaded by the United States, the mission is compassionate and world wide.

Surviving the quake Jean Marie Altema trudged in an agony of uncertainty across the ruined city to reach his wife and child, videotaping as he stumbled. He passed a woman, iconic in her agony, uttering a primeval wail.

"A cry from the heart, " Jean Marie whispered. Nearby confused men and women intoned "The end of the end."

Jean's family was safe.

"Praise God."

Prayers will be said without understanding the why. A bewildered people, noble and resilient in their pain, cry aloud and in silence.

Nature and Nature's God have spoken. Is it sufficient?

St. John Chrysostom declared:

"They whom we love and lose are

no longer where they were before.

They are now wherever we are."