17,520 hours

ago, the earth shook the small island of Haiti.  I was dropping dinner off at my pastor's house when he said, "Angie, there was just an earthquake in Haiti."  It was a few minutes before five in the afternoon of January 12, 2010.  We literally knew within minutes that something terrible had happened.
It's made me think a lot about September 11, in the States.  I started thinking about how we remembered the first and second anniversaries of the attacks.  There were memorials, well-produced, on every TV station.  The best photographs of the day of and immediate days after were compiled to tell the story.  Voice overs and flowing music tugged at your emotions as you saw those images cross the screen.  Everyone talked about where they were when it happened.
Today is my first day back in Haiti.  Some of the kiddos and I un-decorated for Christmas.  As I came back inside from cleaning up, all of the children had gathered in the toddler room to stare at the television mounted on the wall there.  I looked at the screen, and was shocked, appalled, dismayed, sickened, saddened, so many things so quickly...There was no well-designed remembrance video.  No voice over talking about the heroes from that day.  Brian Williams wasn't going live to the scene of the cleanup.  Anderson Cooper wasn't interviewing survivors in his black t-shirt.  No, the screen was filled with someone's video of the day and the immediate events.  Crushed bodies, exploded limbs, children laying on top of their dead parent's body, hordes of people streaming out into the streets, men and women wailing, a collapsed hospital, bodies covered in blood-soaked sheets, collapsed buildings with bodies trapped in plain view.  Zooming in on the wide dead eyes of a crushed skull, a driving tour of the main streets.  All of this assaulted me so quickly, I could hardly think.  I immediately told the nanny that the children did not need to watch that.  They needed to go outside and play, and be children.  Some of them were trapped in buildings like the ones on the screen.  Others lost parents inside those buildings.  They heard the wailing of that day, they smelled the death of that day.  They were not sheltered from any of it.  I flashed back to the dead bodies I saw last year, that thin line between life and death.  Between your life going on like it always has, and suddenly being turned upside down and inside out.
And these people who all lost someone, whether it was a husband, child, or friend, gathered at noon to thank God for his goodness, his faithfulness, to worship and adore their Maker.  To thank Him for life, and family, and children, and homes.  Literally counting their blessings.