LONDON – At first glance, it looks like the partial remains of an ancient mosaic or the garble of an out-of-order digital billboard. Then the scale of the work grabs your attention: It sprawls across three walls of a gallery in London's trendy Chelsea district, stretching more than 40 yards.

Like many works of art, the totality of "American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (but not Including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis nor the Afghanis)," is revealed by standing back. But in Emily Prince's installation each tiny piece of the mosaic is an artwork in itself – 5,158 portraits that chronicle the men and women of the American armed forces who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

Peter Jeary/ NBC News

The art installation at the Saatchi Gallery.

Each portrait, on a piece of card four inches by three inches, has been rendered by Prince from photographs used in on-line obituaries. Where no portrait was available, a blank white card with a name is used instead. The portraits are pencil sketches, with the cards themselves color-coded to depict the racial diversity of the fallen: light brown, dark brown, yellow, off-white. Some of the cards contain brief biographical details of the subject, others just carry their name, hometown, age and the date they died.

When it was first assembled, the portraits were displayed in a grid indicating the hometown of each of the subjects, outlined by the shape of the United States. In its latest incarnation, at the Saatchi Gallery on London's Kings Road, the artwork is in chronological order, with a ten-foot high column marking a week of conflict. The first few columns contain a few scattered portraits, but after three yards the columns get crowded, each containing up to 27 sketches. The first flood of drawings marks March 2003, the start of the Iraq invasion.

Peter Jeary/ NBC News

Two of the pencil portraits of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the left, Charles A. Hanson Jr., Panacea Florida, 22, Nov. 28 2004. On the right, Salamo J. Tuialuuluu, Pago Pago American Samoa, Dec. 4 2004.

Prince said the decision to display the portraits in chronological order makes the piece open to a wider interpretation than the "literal and didactic" depiction in a geographic shape. There are practical advantages, she adds: In the map-like installation the top-most portraits were 35 feet from the floor, making them impossible to view in detail. Now, she says, each portrait is elevated no more than ten feet.

Speaking from her home in San Francisco, Calif., Prince, 28, said that her initial intention had been to transform the abstract numbers of the rising death tolls into something more meaningful. She says she started to sketch the portraits in 2004 without knowing if they would ever leave her studio, working seven days a week for more than a year. At first she depicted soldiers killed in Iraq but then expanded her project to include those lost in the Afghan campaign. Although she says she has strong political views, she wants the work to be politically ambiguous: "So that people can have their own experience whatever their political view."

Waldemar Januszczak, art critic at London's  Sunday Times newspaper, described the installation as a "powerful ... and grim memorial to wasted life."

Peter Jeary/ NBC News

More portraits of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan during March, 2008.

Prince agreed with that description, but hopes her work provides multiple meanings to those who see it. "It is a memorial, but its other things, too," she said. "I wouldn't want a memorial to be monumental, it should be made with humble materials like paper and pencil."

As for Iraqis and Afghans lost in the conflicts, Prince describes the work as unresolved and imperfect. But, she added, "There is negative space in the installation that operates as a gesture towards the unseen victims, with a pressing and poignant absence."

There is another poignant space in the current installation. Four feet of the third wall remains prepared but empty, an area that no doubt will contain more portraits. 

"American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (but not Including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis nor the Afghanis)" is on display at London's Saatchi Gallery until May 7, 2010.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Ramon Crespo isn't leaving Port-au-Prince. Though the dozen children from the Rescue Children orphanage are safe in the countryside, he and six other men from his Pennsylvania church remain behind, helping their neighbors with food, water, medicine and shelter.

The small group plans to stay for at least another two weeks, said Randy Landis, the senior pastor of Lifechurch in Allentown, Pa. The church volunteers went down after the earthquake to safeguard the children they were responsible for. Most of the group, including Landis, is now back in the States.

But no help has arrived for their neighbors in the Santo neighborhood, one mile northeast of the airport in Port-au-Prince. So the intense Crespo, director of missions for the church, has stayed behind, setting up a distribution system for families living under tents.

"We're building little shelters," Landis said. "The U.N. gave us tarps, and we found a store with 2-by-4s. You can see blue tarps up all around the neighborhood."

CLICK FOR VIDEO: Orphans look toward new beginning.

Pediatrician Scott Rice from Allentown, who was in the second wave of church volunteers to travel to Haiti, is treating children and others at the orphanage. Others carry food and water from tent to tent, and try to figure out how to move more supplies down from Allentown.

In the countryside, the 12 Lifechurch children have settled in at the Love A Child orphanage in Fond Parisien, "We taught the children how to play kickball today, lots and lots of fun," Landis said in an update on his Facebook page (registration required: ). "We played kickball for four hours."

The successful trip for Lifechurch depended on the kindness of many strangers.

Some are famous, such as the wife of baseball All-Star Pedro Martinez, Carolina Cruz de Martinez. She drove from her home in Santo Domingo with a medical team, delivering a portable X-ray machine to the Love A Child compound. Now hundreds of wounded have been brought out from Port-au-Prince to a makeshift U.N. hospital there.

"We're trying to do what we can to help," Martinez said. "It's so sad." On her return trip, she and her well-armed security team allowed the first group of Lifechurch volunteers to follow her caravan back to the Dominican Republic on a narrow, unmarked road at night. Besides providing safe passage, she bought the volunteers cold coconut water and Coca-Colas at a stop on the dusty road.

SLIDESHOW: Church rushes to help orphanage in Haiti

 Â

Others are unknown, such as a factory manager in Santo Domingo. When the Lifechurch team was collecting provisions for their journey into Port-au-Prince, they searched the city for large cans to hold diesel fuel, which is still hard to obtain in Haiti. The team went to at least six shops, trying to follow directions. Everyone said the next store was "just five minutes" ahead, which always turned out to be 15, and still no gas cans were found. Finally Jorge Caraballo, a factory manager on his lunch break, got in his truck and let the team follow him to a store, a sort of Dominican Home Depot, where they could stock up. After they had, he refused payment.

Landis, the pastor at Lifechurch, said these contributions and many more, demonstrated the difference between paying to help someone and actually helping them. Yes, aid organizations urge that donors send money, but still everyone can find a small way to reach out. If you search the Bible, he said, you'll find about 800 references to helping the poor.

"When the man was beaten, robbed, left half dead on the road, the Good Samaritan was moved to compassion," Landis said last week, sitting outside the crumbling orphanage in Port-au-Prince. "He didn't just pay to help the man. He knelt down, he identified with his pain, he picked him up, embraced him, put him on his own mule, took him into the city, put him in the inn, told the innkeeper he'd pay whatever it cost, and the man was cared for. He got down into that man's world."

Not everyone on the road from Port-au-Prince was so kind. When they reached Santo Domingo after midnight, the church volunteers were flagged down by police officers on motorcycles. After a long conversation in Spanish, it became clear that the police had somehow detected an expired insurance certificate inside the glove compartment of the rental car. The police were kind enough to allow the churchmen to pay the fine right there on the spot, in American dollars.

Ultimately the church may help match up the orphans with adoptive parents in Allentown. The church already has many volunteers for adoption. Adoptions have been expedited for some other orphans whose paperwork was already under way. It's not clear how long new adoptions might take, and it's not clear that all 12 of the Lifechurch children could be adopted, because some have a living parent in Haiti.

At the same time, the church is planning to build a permanent orphanage on donated land outside of Port-au-Prince. "There are thousands of orphans," Landis said. "There will continue to be a need."

---

A bit of good news: The church team heard at last from Haitian physician Hubermann Debrosse, who drove into Haiti with them before going off to find his wife and two children.

By phone, Debrosse said he found his family safe in Saint-Marc, a coastal town northwest of Port-au-Prince.

"There was a lot of love" at the reunion, he said. But they had many relatives and friends who died, and the family has made several trips to a cemetery.

Read previous stories:

For orphans, safe haven brings new rules

At the end of orphans scary journey, a Haitian oasis

As tension mounts, orphanage group decides to move

An island of relative calm in a sea of chaos

A joyful reunion, but now what?

Armed, resolute, church group heads for Haiti

Pa. pastor 'expecting the worst' at Haitian orphanage

"We have one who lost four. Another who lost five."

He said he hopes to get his wife and children to New Jersey, where he has been living and trying to get a license to practice medicine.

---

As our team from msnbc.com returned to the States, landing in Newark, N.J., we piled into separate taxis.

One of our drivers was Haitian, of course. He said his family was safe.

The other driver, even 10 days after the earthquake, said she had no idea where Haiti was.

Click here to donate to Love A Child . Click here to donate to Lifechurch missions.  Or you can click here for a list of other charitable organizations working on the Haiti earthquake relief effort.

Unlikely though it might sound right now, there is hope for Haiti, and that hope is called Aceh.
As I discovered during a recent five-day visit, the Indonesian province -- devastated by the Christmas 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami -- has made a remarkable recovery.

I'd last been to Aceh shortly after the Christmas 2004 tsunami, which turned the coastal areas into a wasteland. Up to 170,000 people lost their lives in one of the most destructive natural disasters in modern history.

As with Haiti today, it was hard to imagine back then, amid the death and destruction, how the place could ever get back on its feet.

But five years on, and Aceh has been transformed, thanks to a $7 billion international aid effort.

NBC News

A coastline transformed and rebuilt. Five years ago, this area had been wiped clean by the tsunami. Watch Ian's Nightly News report.

Little evidence of the disaster
In the capital Banda Aceh – where television images showed the wall of water rushing through the streets – there is now little physical evidence of the disaster, apart, that is, from a 5,000 ton ship still sitting in the road where it was dumped by the wave, a mile from the coast, and now a morbid tourist attraction.

NBC News

A 5,000 ton ship still sits in the street of Banda Aceh, a mile from the coast.

Fly down the coast, and you see entire towns reconstructed, rows of neat new homes – more than 150,000 of them built largely by NGOs and connected by new bridges and roads. 

However, the most ambitious of the infrastructure projects, a coastal highway financed by the United States, has been plagued by delays, in part the result of land disputes.

"Everything you see on this coast has been built since the tsunami. This was a moonscape," said Amber Desist, the pilot of our small Cessna, as we flew low over the coast. Desist has been flying here for four years for the Mission Aviation Fellowship, a relief organization.

"It's incredible the changes over time," she told me.

'City of the dead'
Our destination was the newly reconstructed town of Cilang, which had been flattened by the disaster.

We'd arranged to meet Tom Alcedo who runs the American Red Cross operation there. He greeted us at the small airfield, telling me: "This entire town was wiped out. They called it the city of the dead."

I asked him what lessons he saw for Haiti. He reminded me that the original aid operation in Aceh had been slow and chaotic. There had also been worries about aid money disappearing in Indonesia's notoriously corrupt bureaucracy.

What galvanized the recovery effort was a strong and transparent reconstruction agency acting as a clearing house for the hundreds of relief organizations, and cutting through the bureaucracy.

"Co-ordination is always a key in any operation," he said. "There was a lot of competing interests in the early days."

Vital also was getting local people fully involved in reconstruction, giving them a stake in their future, and stimulating what remained of the local economy with clean-up programs.

In Aceh, tent cities gave way to temporary, then permanent homes -- trying to keep surviving communities together, but there was no quick fix.

"A priority was getting them out of tents and into something more permanent," he told me. "The most important thing is to take a long view."

Not unlike Haiti, Aceh was racked with civil conflict – a bitter 30-year rebellion. The disaster hastened a peace deal that still stands.

Thousands of the dead, never identified, are buried in two big mass graves in Banda Aceh, each with a memorial.

NBC News

A coastline transformed and rebuilt. Five years ago, this area had been wiped clean by the tsunami. See before and after images.

Tsunami kids
More than a third of the victims were children. Thousands more were orphaned, and there was huge concern at the time about their safety and welfare. Yet five years on, and the tsunami kids have proved surprisingly resilient.

I visited a small Turkish run orphanage on the outskirts of Banda Aceh, home to 93 girls. Most striking and unexpected was their easy smiles even in the torrential rain.

It was here I met Pipit, now 18, and one of three from this orphanage now starting university, where she's studying music and art.

"My parents always wanted me to be a success," she told me. "When I lost them I was so sad, but I realized that God had given me an opportunity, and I should think about the future and do my best."

She wants to be a fashion designer and showed a series of quite striking drawings.

She said it upsets her sometimes when she sees friends talking warmly to their parents. It reminds her of what she's lost.

Aid agencies have tried to use orphanages as a last resort, preferring to place children with relatives, through whom aid and counseling can be channeled.

"Of course there is a place for orphanages," said Rod Varney, who runs the Aceh operations of Mercy Corp.

"The most important thing was to find extended family members and give them the support as opposed to putting the kids in an institution."

'You have to be positive'
Mohammad Iqbal was one of the children taken in by extended relatives. Now 16, he is hugely popular in the neighborhood he lives in with his aunt and uncle.

"He can be a handful, but I understand what he's been through. The most important thing is to bring him up well," said Zulfikar, Iqbal's uncle, who like many Indonesians only uses one name.

Iqbal has had problems concentrating at school, and says when he plays it helps him forget the past. Aid agencies also find it easier to help him because he is supported by relatives.

While Aceh has had five years to rebuild, Haiti is still in the midst of the massive horror and tragedy of the quake's immediate aftermath. Things once felt pretty hopeless in Aceh too, where they've been helped by strong bonds of community and religion.

At the orphanage, Pipit has been thinking about Haiti.

"I know how things can seem so hopeless. But you have to be positive," she told me.

Click here for more from Ian Williams' reports on Nightly News.

There are so many organizations doing great work in Haiti -- and most certainly deserve financial help.

But I want to call attention to one I reported on this past week. I know it well and have been visiting there for decades. GHESKIO is a group of medical workers who have been carrying out heroic efforts to combat HIV/AIDS for some 27 years. As soon as the quake struck, the group immediately took on the task of providing food, water, shelter and medical care for thousands from the nearby slums.

If you can contribute, please go to http://www.gheskio.org/ to donate money. Please don't send anything else. They will use the money well.

When the organization began Haitians were suffering intense discrimination around the world because of AIDS. Under the Duvalier government in Haiti, it was literally a crime to mention AIDS. But these doctors carried on and, recently, they have been giving out life-saving HIV therapy to tens of thousands of Haitians. Amazingly, immediately after the earthquake they were able to resume giving medications to about 80 percent of those patients (probably close to the number who survived the quake), on top of all the other challenges they faced.

GHESKIO, by the way, is the acronym in Creole for the Haitian Group for the Study Of Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections. Because it had been illegal to say the word AIDS — or later HIV — the name stuck. The project works jointly with Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York and gets some fund for its AIDS efforts from the U.S. government. The Haitian doctors who run the organization could have long ago gotten good jobs in the U.S. or elsewhere But they stayed because they love their country. Now they need all the help they can get to help their neighbors survive.

The full list of charities active in Haiti can be found here.

LEOGANE, Haiti – Every morning aboard the USS Bataan, the officers' mess turns into a meeting room and the ship's decision makers gather to share information and plan for the coming days.

It's been six days since the ship arrived off the coast of Haiti. It's been five days since ground operations were launched. And a complete picture of what's needed on the ground is still emerging.

Amna Nawaz / NBC News

Lt. Col. Robert Fulford (left) and Capt. James Birchfield fly over western Haiti to assess the earthquake damage.

Col. Gareth Brandl commands the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU). At the conclusion of the security, systems and information updates on Friday, he addressed the room. His assessment was blunt.

"It's a logistics fight out there," said Brandl. "I don't think we've got the total picture here."

No easy task
For the last six days, Marines from the 22nd MEU and Navy sailors from the USS Bataan have been sprinting to figure out where the help is needed and how to get it there quickly.

But information from remote parts of the country can be hard to come by. Finding aid partners on the ground with a depth of cultural knowledge takes time.  And the U.S. forces plan on being here for a while.

"This is a marathon, not a sprint," Brandl reminded his team. "I don't want to lose our honeymoon period here. We're here to help. We're still pushing stuff ashore. But if we don't get it where it needs to go, we'll quickly lose credibility."

During that sprint, much has been accomplished. Two beachfront landing areas have been established, one in Grand Goave, the other near Pandou. Four landing zones have been established, one in Leogane in the west, and three at Cotes de Fer on the southern coast.

As the officers brief their commanders on their findings from conversations with ground teams and NGO's, one thing is clear. Though much has been done, much, much more is needed.

More challenges ahead

Toward that end, two men set out on a mission Friday.

Lt. Col. Robert Fulford, commander of the 22nd MEU's Battalion Landing Team, and Capt. James Birchfield, commander of the team's Lima Company, boarded a helicopter Friday afternoon and headed west.

The mission was to fly over parts of the country where little help has arrived, assess the damage, determine the needs and make a plan to continue opening up the aid pipelines.

Even from a great height, the damage became a bit clearer. Flying along the coast west of the capital, from Petit Goave west to Miragoane, many homes appear to be intact. Going south over the mountains, down to Cap Saint-Georges, traffic moves along the major roadways. Tent cities crop up in more-populated areas, but the region seems to have sustained less concentrated damage than further east.

Back on the USS Bataan, Fulford and his team met late into the night to plot their next moves.  Their first five days on the ground yielded encouraging results. Six logistical supply lines have been established and are now in use. Bottled water and humanitarian aid rations have been flown in and distributed in harder-to-reach corners of the country.

In the days to come, we'll stay with this team as they continue their work.

 NBC News' Amna Nawaz and Andrew Scritchfield have been embedded with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit on their way to Haiti and on the ground for about a week. Read some of Nawaz's other posts here:

Haitian Marine: 'I understand where they come from'
Desperation seen from above
Marines head towards Haiti

LEOGANE, Haiti – For some Marines of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit deployed to this earthquake ravaged country, the mission is deeply personal.

Cpl. Clifford Sajous, 22, of Elmont, N.Y., enlisted in the Marines four years ago. In the line of men unloading humanitarian supplies off the incoming helicopters in the sweltering heat, Sajous seems like just another man in green. But out on the streets, while on foot patrol in the neighborhoods, he is between worlds.

Sajous was born and raised in Haiti until the age of 13. In Port-au-Prince, at home with his mother and little sister, he was the man of the house from an early age. His mother moved them to New York in search of a better life, and worked at a Haitian restaurant to support them. Sajous taught himself English in six months by watching cartoons and sped through his classes to graduation.  

VIDEO: Haitian-American Marine: 'We give them hope'

He enlisted in the Marines, he says, to say thank you to the country that took him in. That job has now brought him home again, for reasons he never anticipated would bring him back.

"When I lived in Haiti I had similar problems," said Sajous. "Therefore everything they're telling me, I understand where they come from and exactly what they mean."

It's that understanding that makes Sajous a crucial part of this team on the ground.  His commanders consistently use him as a liaison with the crowds. Walking through the neighborhoods on patrol, he is a link between a foreign force eager to offer help and a local population desperate to receive it. But tensions can easily rise in this clash of cultures. 

Julie Jacobson / AP file

U.S. Marines from Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, distribute humanitarian aid rations and water to locals in Leogane, Haiti, on Jan. 19.

'My country'
While on a recent foot patrol in the streets of Leogane, a young Haitian man rode by on a bike and heckled the Marines. "So! You think this is your country now?!?"

"Yeah!" Sajous smiled and replied in Creole. "It is my country!"

The neighborhood erupted in laughter. The Marines walked on. And a few Haitian residents began accompanying the patrol, pointing out landmarks and offering their help.

For Sajous, being home again, for the first time since he left, is bittersweet. He still has not been able to contact his family in Port-au-Prince. The company commanders are trying to facilitate that contact. But Sajous said he has pushed his personal concerns to the back of his mind, and is focused on the people in front of him.

"It hurts me that I can't really help them," he said. "Right now, they're all hungry, they're all thirsty, and I can't really do much about that. But help is coming."

Over three days in the field, the Marines brought in the most help, in the form of potable water and humanitarian aid rations, this part of the country has seen since the earthquake struck.

As Sajous patrolled the street, he took the time to talk with everyone who approached him. He laughed at their jokes. He listened to their problems. And he offered them a chance to be heard.

NBC News' Amna Nawaz and Andrew Scritchfield have been embedded with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit on their way to Haiti and on the ground for about a week. Read some of her other blogs:
Desperation seen from above
Marines head towards Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE – The medical situation in Haiti is improving vastly almost by the minute – more hospitals, more doctors, and more relief supplies coming in. Although it's clearly too late for a lot of people who got infections from wounds that progressed too far to be saved.  

But overall, more and more people's lives are being saved and the situation has gotten much more organized. For instance, Port-au-Prince General, the public hospital and the biggest hospital in the city, has a very efficient system now.  U.S. soldiers from the 82nd Airborne are helping out. They have implemented a very orderly admissions process – a triage system – so that the sickest get treated right away. And the hospital now has at least 10 operating rooms functioning full time.  

SLIDESHOW: Haitians grapple with earthquake's aftermath

In terms of supplies, there has been some improvement in terms of distributing goods on the ground, but there is still a constant shortage of supplies. The U.S. Marines are dropping supplies at the Presidential Palace via helicopter drop and those supplies can be brought to the hospital. 

One of the many bottlenecks has been the lack of functioning vehicles and the short supply of gasoline.  As a result, getting supplies to the airport is just the first step in a long process of trying to get it to where it is needed. If water or food just gets dropped into a group of people, it can create a mini-riot. So it has to be given out in an orderly way.  The same rule applies to medical supplies.  If you can get it very close to where you want it to be, you've made the process much faster.

These hospitals are still doing an awful lot of amputations because wounds are getting gangrenous. And because of the nature of crush injuries, which break down the blood cells and can damage kidneys, a lot of people need dialysis. Some of the hospitals, as well as the USS Comfort, are beginning to have the capability to help people who need dialysis, so that's an improvement.

Making best of bad situation
But the long-term question in terms of health is that you can't untie sanitation, housing and health. They all go together in a big way. They are enormous challenges and it's not clear what's going to happen with them in the next few weeks and months.

VIDEO: Saving lives in a world of ruin

I spent a lot of time at GHESKIO, an acronym for a Haitian group who were among the first to treat AIDS here, and saw how they were making the best of a bad situation.

They immediately turned the grounds of their clinic into a shelter. Dr. Jean Pape, the doctor in charge of the clinic, said that he really had no choice because the people who lived nearby had no place to go.  He managed to get food and he couldn't get more water delivered, but he was able to throw chlorine into the water he had so he could to purify it and distribute it. By the time I saw it, the make-shift camp probably had about 10,000 people.

Pape set up a system to distribute food that wouldn't cause riots. They had hundreds of pounds of rice that they got from an aid organization, but for the first few days they were very cautious about distributing it. 

There was one guy in camp who seemed to be itching to create a riot. He seemed like an organizer, but also a rabble rouser who might cause trouble. So, the clinic co-opted him by hiring him for a small amount of money to be the organizer of the food distribution system.

Then they also identified women throughout the camp who were cooking some food already. These women were getting food because their husbands were out scrounging or had gotten food from relatives. There was not a lot of food, but they were cooking. They designated those women to cook the food for everyone – the idea being that they would have to share. So that way, suddenly, food was disbursed throughout the entire camp in an orderly way and there were no big riots.

VIDEO: USNS Comfort soothes ailing quake victims

Critical issues: Sanitation & housing
So that was the food issue, the next big issue is sanitation. Everybody is screaming for sanitation.

Someone asked Army Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, the commander of Joint Task Force Haiti, about portable toilets at the Port-au-Prince General Hospital and he said that there was not a single portable toilet in Haiti.   

But improving sanitation is high on the list of things to do. People are defecating on the ground and it's an enormous public health issue. There is almost certainly going to be a typhoid outbreak in the next week or two if something isn't done about providing better sanitation.

Then the next need is tents. These people are sleeping outside under bits of sheets or blankets. It's not the rainy season, but it could rain anytime. And you can only imagine how bad the health consequences could get if it does rain.

And right now, you have people who have successfully had a leg amputated and dressed properly, but very few of these medical facilities have any clean place where people can stay. So people go back to sleeping in these horribly, filthy situations. Inevitably, a lot of these wounds are going to get re-infected and could cause a second wave of people who will need to be treated for their wounds again. And a lot of those people may die.

It makes you wonder about what kind of shelter these people will live in. Will Haiti become a country of tent cities?

On Friday, hundreds of thousands of people crammed onto buses to flee Port-au-Prince and move to tent cities the government promised would be cleaner and safer. Others were also trying to get out to the countryside where they could stay with relatives. 

Because having a mass of people assembled in the city is a disease outbreak waiting to happen. Tuberculosis, respiratory and diarrhea-related illnesses are a constant threat.

So there has to be a long-term plan. But Haiti isn't a place where there is much of a functioning government. And I'm not sure who wants to pay for it. The world has put a generous amount of money and people towards the immediate rescue effort, but people have to start thinking long term.

Resilient people
Still, you see survival stories every day. There is a beauty about the people and parts of the country that is inspiring. The Haitian people have lived through so much misery. From the recent hurricanes, to the political situation, to the enormous AIDS outbreak and the intense poverty that they live with daily that they are very tough people.

They are able to take a lot because they've been through so much. And maybe that will end up playing to their advantage. 

In terms of survival stories, we've seen so many amazing individual stories. But they add to a collective story of people who are capable of being very wily and able to take care of themselves because they have been so poor and suffered so much, for so long. There is resilience, but you'd have to say it's been tested pretty severely.   

Click for complete coverage of the earthquake in Haiti

FOND PARISIEN, Haiti – On their first full day at the pastoral Love a Child orphanage, in the hills outside of Port-au-Prince, the dozen rescued orphans started to settle into a new home with new standards of discipline.

They are safe, clean, well fed and well hugged. They're also expected to do chores if they want to eat.

"It's nice," said Mafouna, 12, who stood cautiously in the sprawling yard, looking sideways, because the orphanage's gentle stallion, Victor, was trying to nuzzle her ear.

David Friedman / msnbc.com Love A Child co-founder and director Sherry Burnette checks to make sure that, Mafouna, center, one of theÅ new arrivals at the orphanage in Fond Parisien, Haiti, is getting acclimated to her new home. To help the children from the Rescue Children Orphanage get used to their new surrounding, each child was paired up with a "buddy" from the Love A Child orphange. The two new friends are seen here.

The children see familiar faces here on the 100-acre lakeside compound, an hour's drive from the chaotic capital. The new orphanage would not take them in unless adults from their old orphanage came along to help with their care. So two "mommies," or adult women, came from their Rescue Children Orphanage in Port-au-Prince, sponsored by the Lifechurch volunteers from Allentown, Pa.

The orphansÅ and most of their adult protectors bugged out of that crumbling, insecure environment on Tuesday. Men from the group spent another day there, paying neighbors to help pack the truck. After frantic calls from loved ones back in Pennsylvania, a three-person security team from the State Department drove by with tactical gear to see whether anyone needed to be extracted. But the situation was calm, so they moved on, followed soon by the men driving out truckloads of belongings.

After a night and a day at the Love A Child compound, it appears that this place is aptly named. It's hard to imagine a safer place in Haiti right now.

Our lastÅ blog postÅ prompted comments from readers -- some worried, some disapproving -- about the use of corporal punishment at the new orphanage. Referring to co-founder Sherry Burnette, we said, "She's the one with the whistle and a belt, and knows how to use both."

That's entirely accurate, but it didn't give the full picture.

No one is running around the compound beating the children.

SLIDESHOW: Church rushes to help orphange in Haiti

Å Å

Yes, she does blow the whistle when she needs 80 children to stop what they're doing. We heard a blast when two of the new boys climbed on top of the monkey bars where it's not safe. She shouted in Creole for them to get down.

And yes, she said, she does use a belt or a switch for "a swat on the bottom." We saw her ask a television crew member if she could borrow his belt, because she was going off to have a stern talk with a child. She came back saying, "I didn't need to use it this time."

"You can't run an orphanage where the children are out of control," said Sherry's husband, co-founder Bobby Burnette, when told about the comments from msnbc.com readers, or else everyone's health and safety is endangered. "You have to respect adults. You have to help with the chores. We give them a swat on the bottom if we have to. Many of these children have been beaten, before they came to us, but here they're loved."

He said Americans, particularly younger ones, don't remember being spanked, but their parents certainly do. This, he said, is one reason why American children are so poorly behaved, and why Haitian children are so well behaved.

The Lifechurch children have now seen three different orphanages in six months, and three different styles of discipline.

INTERACTIVE: Meet the children

In their first home, discipline was very harsh, and some abuse had occurred, according to members of the Lifechurch group that then took over. The keys to the Rescue Children Orphanage were essentially handed to the Pennsylvania church's members after mission director Ramon Crespo met the orphanage leader at the airport as he offered to help carry her bag. "We had never planned to run an orphanage," said senior pastor Randy Landis.

Lifechurch's disciplinary style was based more on reward than punishment. The "house father," David Harris, a retired management trainer, said he instituted a system of privileges. Toys were a privilege. Watching a video was a privilege. Disobeying meant losing those privileges.

The children did have chores, and a schedule for every day was posted on the wall. Bathrooms were cleaned at 6 in the morning before school.

But there was no punishment, and certainly no spanking. The children seemed well behaved, for their ages, even after the earthquake disrupted their lives and sent them out into the garden for safety.

On Tuesday morning, they awoke to a new style. Before breakfast, the 80 children were organized by age group for chores. The smallest ones picked up leaves from the driveway or straightened up the toys. The middle ones straightened their bunk room. The older girls, Mafouna and Marie-Victoire, 15, helped package meals for medical workers at the Love A Child clinic.

Then came a confrontation of titans.

Sherry Burnette, 62, asked 7-year-old Widlyne to help clean up. Back at the Lifechurch orphanage, Widlyne had sometimes been a bit of a handful, though her behavior was improving, said Harris. Still, if there were shouts of "Fight! Fight!" on the playground, Widlyne was probably in the middle of it.

Now Widlyne was being asked, before breakfast, to pitch in.

"I already clean up," Widlyne said, sounding less than convincing.

"No, don't tell me you cleaned up," Sherry told her. "You have to clean."

"No," Widlyne said.

Sherry doesn't seem to hear "No" very often, but she tried politeness one more time.

"Please help clean," Sherry said.

"No," Widlyne said, crossing her arms, setting her shoulders and tucking in her chin in her usual show of defiance.

Sherry had an answer for that: "You don't work, you don't eat. Everybody works."

Widlyne gave in, at least for a few minutes.

Read previous stories:

At the end of orphans scary journey, a Haitian oasis

As tension mounts, orphanage group decides to move

An island of relative calm in a sea of chaos

A joyful reunion, but now what?

Armed, resolute, church group heads for Haiti

Pa. pastor 'expecting the worst' at Haitian orphanage

After lunchtime, the children were asked what they thought of the new place. "It's nice," said Stevenson, 7, another intelligent and strong-willed child. He didn't sound enthusiastic about it, or unenthusiastic, just as if he were pointing out an obvious fact of life.

He no longer slept outside or showered in the garden for fear that the house would collapse. He could see mountains and a playground, not razor wire. When someone knocked on a door, he didn't see men grabbing their machetes and shotgun.

And what about Sherry and her rules?

"You don't work, you don't eat," Stevenson said, stating another fact of his new life.

Click here to donate to Love A Child . Click here to donate to Lifechurch missions.Å  Or you can click here for a list of other charitable organizations working on the Haiti earthquake relief effort.

PORT-AU-PRINCE – The cavalry has arrived in many ways, in terms of the medical care here. More supplies are coming in every day. There are dozens of facilities around Port-au-Prince that are providing medical care, and the hospitals have been functioning more and more.

The biggest problem is coordination between various places. It's haphazard, confused and communication is extraordinarily difficult. Doctors at each hospital don't know which other hospitals have space. Some places will be swamped with people who need severe interventions like amputations or more complicated surgery, and the places won't have the capability to offer it. Other hospitals that do have these capabilities end up getting enormous numbers of people who just have simple bruises. 

SLIDESHOW: Haiti earthquake

At a clinic I was in on Tuesday, I saw a man who had a fractured back that couldn't be helped. The hospital managed to make contact with another facility, which is not easy in Haiti. They took him to the other hospital, but by that time all the beds were full. They then had to take him back through very dangerous, pothole-filled streets to the original clinic.

The medical groups are trying to organize some kind of system to coordinate this kind of care, but the difficulties are overwhelming.

There are many non-government organizations providing care, such as Doctors Without Borders, as well as other governments, including Israel, China, Venezuela and Cuba. But nobody knows what anybody else is doing.

At this point, infections are setting in. People who were wounded in the earthquake – who could have been easily treated at an American emergency room – are starting to die from infections at very high rates.

Amazingly patient

Around the city, there are enormous encampments of homeless people where there are no proper sanitation facilities and very little effort to set them up. There's a fear typhoid could be the first disease outbreak, which could happen anytime in the next few weeks. Cholera is another concern.

Yet, for the most part, patients at the medical facilities are amazingly patient, even though they are sitting in the sun waiting for treatment. In my personal encounters with people, they have been extraordinarily polite. Sometimes you get people complaining loudly, but no more than you would get in a typical emergency room in the United States.

VIDEO: Field hospital a model for crisis care

The care they can get is enormously variable. The U.S. has several hospitals running emergency response units which were set up by the Department of Health and Human Services. It took days getting those hospitals in place, before the 82 Airborne determined the facilities were secure.

On Monday, I went into an illegal slum on the hillside, which probably housed 10,000 people. I was the first person to go there from the outside – they had not seen anybody from the government; they hadn't seen a journalist or rescue worker. The people in the slums were on their own.

There were dead bodies everywhere. Some people had tried to continue living in their collapsed structures, but because of aftershocks they had moved out and they were either sleeping on the streets or on any space or lot they could find. The people were stunned and many were angry that nobody had come yet.

On the ground in Port-au-Prince there were some very sad sights, like a child's school work, from a child who was doing his or her history or French homework when the earthquake struck, splattered with blood. It's a place of enormous sadness.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Nearly a week after the devastating earthquake, victims who sustained crush injuries and broken limbs are now suffering from rampant secondary infections.

Faced with an overflow of patients and an ongoing shortage of antibiotics, medical teams have few options for saving lives. Amputation is increasingly the only resort, says NBC's Dr. Nancy Synderman, who has been helping to treat patients in Port-au-Prince.
She spoke with msnbc.com about the rush to save lives at a small private hospital in Port-au-Prince.

What is the main concern of medical teams treating quake victims now?

Increasingly, it's been amputate or die. Secondary infections are huge. It's the No. 1 cause of death right now. We've not yet seen cholera or dysentery.

We're seeing so many people with crush injuries and open wounds. And because there isn't the time or the antibiotics to save an infected arm like you might have back home, the decision is, if you can amputate an arm, you can save a life.

We've been at Sacré Coeur, a small private hospital that has been turned into a trauma center. On Monday, they estimated they were going to amputate the arms or legs of up to 70 people.

Whether it's babies or the middle-aged, they are tagging people for these operations right and left. Because so many Haitians don't have medical records, a doctor we followed, Dr. Julie Manley from Raleigh, N.C., was walking around with a pad of paper and writing down what patients needed and taping it to their chest.

We watched a young girl, probably about 5, with a severe injury to her right leg. Dr. Manley said to her mother, she needs to have her right leg amputated and the mother said, no, that she would rather that she die. The little girl could hear the interpretation about her leg in French and she started crying with great anguish, "mama, mama, mama." The doctor had to instruct the mom to hold her daughter's hand and not leave her. The little girl is going to die if she doesn't have her leg cut off.

In a country where survival is so tough, for an amputee, it's nearly impossible. Its raises the question of what's going to happen? There are no prosthetics for a country that may soon be a country of orphans and amputees.

I saw babies whose skulls had been cracked open like watermelons. The best doctors could do is put a wrap around their heads and cover them and leave them to die.

The job right now is to treat the minimally wounded and get them on their way so they don't take up valuable space. Doctors have to take the people who are dying and humanely put them on the periphery and cover them to keep the flies off. Then you have to take care of those people where you think you can make a difference.

Click here to read the rest Dr. Nancy's interview about the medical challenges in Haiti.

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic – There's a strange feeling of distance here from the disaster in Haiti. Even though it's just a drive across Hispaniola, over a border that separates the two countries that share the same island – as well as a contentious and often violent history – it feels very different.

The earthquake has also had an impact here, of course. Thousands of injured victims have been evacuated to hospitals here or have made their way across the border on their own. Some people we spoke to said they walked for several days to get to the Melenciano Hospital, in the border town of Jimani.

Kena Betancur / Reuters file

Haiti's President Rene Preval, left, embracees his Dominican Republic counterpart Leonel Fernandez, right, at the national airport as they finish a meeting with U.N representatives in Port-au-Prince on Jan.14.

But in that hospital we saw an eerie, almost stoic kind of chaos, so different from the scenes in the makeshift field hospitals in Port-au-Prince.

Yes, there were hundreds of patients covering every bed and cot and human-sized piece of floor space, but there was no shortage of medical supplies or volunteers.

Over the weekend the hospital had provided emergency care or surgery to around 1,000 quake victims.

Santo Domingo's airport has also been the delivery and embarkation point for thousands of tons of relief supplies that Haiti's damaged airport and harbor haven't been able to handle. 

A steady stream of freshly loaded trucks flows slowly along the laborious 160-mile route to the quake zone.

But with an estimated 1.5 million Haitians newly homeless, Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez said in an interview on Monday evening that he has no intention of simply opening up the border and adding indiscriminately to the estimated 800,000 Haitians already living in his country.

In fact there have been reports that the immigration restrictions have actually been tightened since the emergency. "We have to be careful, and smart about this," Fernandez said. He added that one concern is that the collapse of Haiti's main prison in Port-au-Prince means "4,000 of their worst criminals are now on the loose."

Time to overcome history
And there it was, that "us and them" sense you often get here, all of it rooted in the history of two neighbors who have never been close and have several times been at outright war with each other.

Fernandez sat down with us after a long day of hosting representatives of more than a dozen countries, including delegates from the United States and the European Union, in a meeting at the presidential palace in Santo Domingo about coming to Haiti's rescue. Everyone said what you would expect them to say: that Haiti needs all the help the community of nations can give and that they would pledge the millions needed to pay for that help.

VIDEO: Quake offers an 'opportunity to work together' Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez tells NBC's Mike Taibbi

Then Haiti's President, Rene Preval, criticized bitterly at home for being largely invisible since the earthquake, stood to talk and soon addressed Fernandez directly. "We live on the same island and we have to overcome past differences," he said. "Haiti will not be able to recover on its own … and we have a duty now to strengthen the economic and cultural ties between two peoples who share the same island."

Later, in his interview with us, Fernandez brought up those differences without prompting. He reminded us that Haiti won its independence from the French two centuries ago in what was essentially a slave revolt, while the Dominican Republic ultimately won its independence … from Haiti! 

Fernandez talked about two Dominican aid workers who were caught in the crossfire over the weekend in ravaged Port-au-Prince, one of whom was killed. He also touched on long-ago history, the so-called "Parsley Massacre" in 1937 when Dominican dictator Raphael Trujillo ordered the massacre of any Haitians living on the Dominican side of the border, and his secret police used machetes to murder more than 35,000 people in one bloody week. 

"There are prejudices still on both sides," Fernandez said, but added that the current tragedy "is an opportunity for us to work together while getting past that history, something that's already happening."

Some of the Dominicans we've spoken to have expressed genuine sympathy for the plight of their neighbors while still returning reflexively to that "us and them" sense of who their neighbors are: people who live in one of the most corrupt countries on Earth, whose government has changed hands through violent coup more than 30 times in its history, whose country (as even President Fernandez was quoted as saying) was a tragedy even before the afternoon of Jan. 12, 2010.

At the border, I asked an armed Dominican guard what the rules were when homeless Haitians presented themselves as refugees. He pointed to the customs shed to our left, a small building with a half-staff Haitian flag flapping behind it on the other side of the border. "They would have to be allowed in through there," he said.

We were at the border for more than a half hour. I saw no Haitians come through the customs shed door. 

FOND PARISIEN, Haiti – After a tense week at their crumbling orphanage in Port-au-Prince, the dozen children protected by Lifechurch volunteers were evacuated on Monday afternoon to a beautiful orphanage 40 minutes away, nearer the Dominican border. Two of the men and two women stayed behind for the night to guard their food, generator and other supplies.

The security situation deteriorated quicklyÅ at the Rescue Children orphanage early in the day, with scowling men knocking on the gate demanding food. And looters showed up for the first time in the Santo neighborhood, about a mile northeast of the Port-au-Prince airport.

The men from Lifechurch, in Allentown, Pa., packed a hired truck with two big bottles of water, clothes and the tent that the children had slept in since the quake a week ago. After a hurried lunch of potatoes and carrots, 12 children piled into their SUV and the truck, along with senior pastor Randy Landis, "house father" David Harris and "mama" Regina Benoit.

David Friedman / msnbc.com Mission leader Ramon Crespo says goodbye to Roger, 9, before the children and staff of Rescue Children orphanage evacuate their compound.

"Don't let Pastor Randy come back for us after dark," whispered mission director Ramon Crespo, "and tell my wife not to come."

Crespo stayed behind with church volunteer handyman Ramon Morales and house mothers Anita Delcine and Mama Ketteley. The plan was to return to pick up the two women, but for the two Ramons to stay the night, providing security for the rest of the belongings they had collected in the few months of running the orphanage.

Yes, Crespo said, he understood that nothing at the house was worth his life. But he couldn't leave, not with the generator and the food still there. And he said he wanted to keep the damaged house secure from looters so it could be handed back over to the owner's attorney properly.

Outside the gate, for the first time the children saw the collapsed houses of their neighborhood, including one just down the street where three people died. "Oh, look at that one," they said repeatedly inÅ  Creole.

INTERACTIVE: Meet the children

The caravan passed out of Port-au-Prince into the hills toward the Dominican border. Forty-minutes away, past banana groves and cactus fields, they came to the edge of a large lake in a place called Fond Parisien.

David Friedman / msnbc.com Rodlin, 10, looks out a car window at the grounds of Love A Child orphanage, his new temporary home.

This was another world entirely. Behind guarded fences, the red tile roofs of Love A Child Mission contain a 20,000-square-foot orphanage, a health clinic, a giant warehouse for food distribution and a Christian radio station. Three horses grazed in the front yard under a sliver of moon. There was evenÅ  a playground.

The 67 orphans at Love a Child turned out to greet the newcomers, under the command of founders Bobby and Sherry Burnette. Or Sherry's command, anyway. She's the one with the whistle and a belt, and knows how to use both. "Rapid! Rapid!" she yelled, and the younger children all helped unload the truck, even huge bags of clothes and mattresses.

David Friedman / msnbc.com The Rescue Children orphange children, left, meet the children of the Love A Child orphanage.

The new children were photographed, one by one, in police booking photo style, holding a paper with their name and age. In an assembly, each new arrival was paired up with a longtime resident to be a mentor.

"Everything that you see is yours now. This is your home," minister Bobby Burnette told the orphans from Port-au-PrinceÅ in his Florida drawl. Both age 62, the Burnettes met at a church tent revival in Orlando, and started spending their Christmas vacations in Jamaica, handing out food. "Some people told us that Haiti was poor, so we came here in 1971, and the children stole our hearts," Bobby said. They moved here permanently in 1991, started handing out powdered milk from a 50-pound bag, and have built a TV-fueled mission built on accountability and high standards.

All the talk of a devastated Haiti is bunk, Bobby Burnette said as Sherry got the children organized.

"Haiti people have a survivor mindset," Bobby said. "They'll come right through it. We've had dental clinics and we run out of Novocain. A Haitian will sit in a chair and you can pull as many teeth as you want. A Haitian can take pain because he's used to pain. That's their life."

David Friedman / msnbc.com All the kids are enlisted to help unload the belongings of the Rescue Children children.

Then the children went in pairs to stow their clothes in cubbies in a bunk room. Then there was time for a shower and a hot meal on a tablecloth: meat loaf, potatoes, even strawberry ice cream. The adults would sleep outside in a tent, but inside they had a good cell phone signal, air conditioning and Wi-Fi.

Not all the children slept in bunk beds. Because of the quake, Bobby Burnette said, many of the orphans fear sleeping in the building. So several dozen sleep by the house gate, on pallets on the floor, so they can run out quickly if there's a tremor in the night.

Landis, the pastor, was worried about his volunteers and staff still back in Port-au-Prince. He was prepared to drive back in the dark to pick up the women, but the U.S.. State Department advised otherwise: Do not go back into the city. If you're out, stay out. Maybe we can send some military personnel to pick up all your people. Maybe not. But stay out.

On a cell phone, Landis tried to explain to Crespo that they should all evacuate tonight. Crespo refused. Come for the women if you want, but he would stay.

A second wave of Lifechurch volunteers was due in from the Dominican Republic late Monday, but there was no sign of them yet.

SLIDESHOW: Church rushes to help orphange in Haiti

Å Å

Doctors stopping at Love a Child's medical clinic said the border was backed up for six to eight hours. They were waiting for 90 gallons of gas, which they needed to continue ferrying injured patients out of Port-au-Prince. In the clinic, a Haitian woman pulled from a collapsed five-story building had a crushed ribcage. A man who suffered trauma to his bladder had not peed in three days. Doctors at Love a Child patch them up as best they can, then bus them to a U.N. hospital just across the border.

At 10:30 p.m. the second team from Lifechurch arrived at Love A Child. Six on a medical team from Lifechurch settled in at the medical clinic. The new arrivals included Ramon Crespo's wife, Luz, who helps run the church's mission work. She was told that Ramon sent word, a stern word, that she was not to go into the city. "I will deal with my husband," she said.

SoÅ PastorÅ Landis and David Harris -- along with four big, strong men in the new volunteer group -- headed back to Port-au-Prince. They plan to load up a truck and bring it out on Tuesday.

Read previous stories:

As tension mounts, orphanage group decides to move

An island of relative calm in a sea of chaos

A joyful reunion, but now what?

Armed, resolute, church group heads for Haiti

Pa. pastor 'expecting the worst' at Haitian orphanage

Just after 11, their white SUV headed out of the Love a Child gates and into the darkness.

"Life is a series of risks and rewards," Landis said before leaving. "Having an effective life is getting that balance right."

Click here to donate to Love A Child . Click here to donate to Lifechurch missions.Å  Or you can click here for a list of other charitable organizations working on the Haiti earthquake relief effort.

Looking for or have news on a child in Haiti? Click here to submit your information.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The split-second choices in a disaster of this magnitude can haunt forever.

Dr. Marc Grossman knows he had no choice but to choose life over limb, but of course, would have preferred another option.

An emergency room physician at Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital, Grossman is a member of the South Florida Urban Search and Rescue Task Force.

The team, tunneling through debris at a collapsed school on Saturday, found a 15-year-old girl still alive.

But she was pinned. Her left arm was crushed under concrete.

VIDEO: Doctor describes dramatic amputation and dual rescue

If there were time, the team had the gear that could lift 25,000 pounds of rubble. They might have been able to shift the rubble just enough to get her arm out.

But there was no time.

"She was dying right in front of me," said Grossman.

A father of two, Grossman called a colleague back at Jackson Memorial to talk "amputation."

He said he got instructions from his colleague on how to perform an amputation, but the directions were as if he were working in a sterile operating home back home. This, of course was no operating room. And it was far from sterile.

In an opening, less than 12 inches high, the doctor inch-wormed his way to the teenager.

He knocked her out with drugs, and then with a scalpel, tried to cut.

It didn't work.

In that tiny space, it could not cut thru the bone. 

He backed out and then slithered in with a surgical bone saw.

That didn't work either.

He had less than an inch of space to draw the blade back and forth.

Grossman backed out again and looked at what else the search team had.

There, in the pile of gear sat a circular saw.

"It's like a saw found in any Home Depot in America" said Grossman.

The team carries it to cut tree branches and other debris in disasters, but now it would become a surgical instrument.

Grossman worked his way back to the survivor.

With a tourniquet tied around her upper left arm, in one cut, he took off her arm.

He pulled her to freedom.

But there was more.

Just behind the now amputated survivor, there was another girl.

She was also still alive.

Had the first girl's arm not been amputated, "the other survivor would have surely died, too. There was no way to get to her but through the pinned survivor," said Grossman.

A split-second decision in the darkness of a tunnel through a collapsed building that saved not one, but two lives.

ABOARD THE USS Bataan – As the USS Bataan, an amphibious assault ship carrying over 2,200 Marines headed through the Windward Passage, the strait between Cuba and Haiti in the Caribbean Sea, a small assessment team took off in heavy-lift helicopters to do a visual reconnaissance mission over Haiti.

We were lucky enough to get on one of the helicopters and join some of the Marines as they flew over Port-au-Prince on Monday.

 

Amna Nawaz/NBC News

An assessment team from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit flies over Haiti.Â

Even the constant, deafening roar aboard those choppers could not drown out the beauty below us. One could clearly see glistening blue waters with deep green stretches. From afar, it was paradise. But the closer we got, the more apparent the tragedy of Haiti became.

It was easier to count the structures that were not damaged by the earthquake than those that were. As we flew along the coast in the bay, down over Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas, the country lay in shambles below us.

All the pictures you see from the ground – collapsed houses, individuals desperate for basic necessities – when viewed en masse from the air seem almost more striking. We could see row after row of crumbled structures and group after group of vulnerable, displaced people. Plumes of smoke also dotted the land. We tried to capture what we could with our camera lenses.

Andrew Scritchfield/NBC News

NBC's Amna Nawaz, embedded with a Marine unit entering Haiti, shoots video during a Marine flyover of Port-au-Prince on Monday.

A fellow journalist on the helicopter snapped photo after photo from the window, looking down at the destruction below. As we turned around after an hour and a half or so, he sat back down to review his pictures. One stood out. A lone woman, surrounded by a destroyed home and little else, looking up at the helicopter with arms outstretched. Even from the sky, her desperation was clear.

The Marines from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit are launching their first boots on the ground in Haiti Tuesday and hope to alleviate some of the desperation across the quake zone. Their mission is to secure landing zones for humanitarian aid deliveries and distribution. Again, we'll be with them. And we'll bring you their story as we go.

By Cynthia Joyce, msnbc.com

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of twelve novels, including "All Souls Rising," the first work in a fictional trilogy about the Haitian revolution. He is also the author of a 2007 biography of the revolution's leader, Toussaint Louverture. A writing professor with longtime ties to Haiti, Bell has written extensively about the depth of Haiti's spiritual and cultural riches. He recently spoke with MSNBC.com by phone about the importance of maintaining faith in Haiti's past, present and future.

Former President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others have emphasized the progress made in Haiti in the years prior to this catastrophe, being very careful to draw a fuller picture of the country as more than just a perennial victim of tragedy. What are your thoughts?

It's true, there has been progress. And I don't think all of this is necessarily going to be lost. The Preval administration is the best and most stable government there's been since probably Duvalier fell.

[President Rene] Preval is very much – and unusually for a Haitian member of state – not interested in power for its own sake. That seems to be the prevailing wisdom. And, knowing him slightly, I think so, too. I think he was genuinely reluctant to run – his late entry was not some kind of gambit or pose. He's unlike so many Haitians who start out as populist reformers and they evolve into dictators. Preval seems to be immune to that problem. This is still a government with 20 million problems and defects. But it's better than what they've had for a while.

Secondly, security has greatly ameliorated – especially in the last few months, in the year 2009 – and that's very important. In 2004, you started to get this kidnapping culture where anybody had to think twice about going there. It was no good for business development – it was terrible for everything – and it was really dangerous to future of country.

You can't expect miracles, but under Preval, I think [security officials] were really, really good. This group was trained to deal with gangsters and kidnappers – that was the thing they needed to do right then. And they've been pretty effective with the U.S. military mission behind them. The previous one – under Clinton – was staffed by a majority of Americans. Our military was admirably successful there under Clinton. The Special Forces, the A-teams, they were trained for nation-building type stuff, and they did it well.

Now, it's all Pan-Caribbean  – a lot of boots on the ground were actually Brazilian, last time I looked – people from other third world countries in the region who understand the conditions. They're not so vulnerable to diseases, and they've been very effective in breaking up gangs and improving security. And this is the really impressive part – just a few weeks before the quake, the U.S. State Department had taken all warnings off travel to Haiti. That's astonishing. It would maybe go from orange alert to white-hot burning  – but never to blue or green. It's very hard to get them to do that.

Thirdly, there has been a broad-based effort to develop more foreign investment. The Aristide programs that I was interested in were about self-sufficiency, where, if they could get organized agriculturally to produce enough to eat themselves, they could get out of the economic deathtrap that they're in, where they have to eat with U.S. dollars, in effect.

Clinton had been very effective in setting up textile factories – it's not great, but it was better than nothing. Anything like that obviously has now been severely set back. It's going to take a long time for them to restore even basic services. One plant has said already it was planning to leave.

On the other hand, there's lots of work to be done. The rebuilding effort should be an employment program for Haitians—if we have enough sense to do that.

While there have been several isolated incidences of violence, it seems there's less than one might anticipate in this situation  – but the fear of a major outbreak is a consuming concern.

I don't think it has to happen. It is just as likely in the wake of this  – as in New York for quite some time after  9/11 – criminal activity was more or less suspended. Everybody did kind of pull together. I hope it'll break that way and not the other way. There seems to be enough military presence to encourage it going the right way.

It's important not to come out of this losing security gains.  Part of their security problems before had to do with their "no-go" areas, where it was hard to go in to conduct operations against gangs. Police were often accused, probably correctly, of killing innocent bystanders when they tried to go into these cardboard wasps' nests, with everybody running around firing automatic weapons.

That's gone. The architecture of that situation no longer exists. And while it's hard to pull a silver lining out of this, some Haitians are already saying, what we might get out of this is a clean slate  – a from-the-bottom-up building of infrastructure that has been necessary for 50-60 years.

You've said in the past that "Haiti, and the conditions of living in Haiti, are closer to us here than we used to like to think." What did you mean by that?

At the time that I wrote that, [the article appeared in the New York Times' Paper Cuts Blog on Jan. 7, 2009], our economy was crashing. There was a lot of talk about the decay of our infrastructure – one example being our inability to efficiently address the immediate aftermath of Katrina. In Baltimore, there are today large areas that are, for all intents and purposes, completely lawless. Government services are non-existent. There are sectors of the U.S. that are like that. We have these third world pockets in our own country, and we are getting poorer all the time.

But since then, world food prices went up 40 percent. It's hard to appreciate the different threshold. Maybe we stop buying asparagus. Haitians start eating dirt.

You wrote recently, "Haitians are expert in survival against all odds. They had been doing it for a century before their nation had a name. They now need this more than ever, but at least they have it. And they are also fortunate in that their cultural treasure is not so much bound up in architectural monuments (most of which, in the capital at least, are now rubble). A spiritual resource is that much more difficult to destroy. Let us try to remember as we try to help that we have as much to gain from Haiti spiritually as we have to give materially." Do you still feel hopeful?

It's going to get worse. But I believe Obama's the best president we could have in this situation. I read his first book about going to Kenya, where he had that feeling of retuning to an earlier point of mankind. I shared that feeling in Haiti.

But it is going to get worse. Maybe it's possible we could get in there fast enough to not have a cholera epidemic, but that's in the cards. It's going to be hell. On the other side of that, I insist on believing there's an opportunity.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Tension was ratcheting higher Monday at the Rescue Children orphanage in Port-au-Prince.

For the first time, the members of Lifechurch who rushed to the orphanage after the killer earthquake saw looters in the neighborhood, three men in a taptap (taxi truck), going from house to house. Only the collapsed houses for now.

Concern also has been mounting over men who are knocking at the door, asking to charge their cell phones. The cell networks are working intermittently in Port-au-Prince, but that's no good if you don't have power to charge your phone.

David Friedman / msnbc.com CLICK FOR VIDEO: Mission leader Ramon Crespo explains to the kids at the Rescue Children orphanage why they have to leave.

The orphanage staff from Allentown, Pa., may have made a mistake early on by letting neighbors charge their phones. The idea was to build goodwill to aid security. 

It was fine when a few people a day came to the gate. They'd knock, hold up their phones and say "Charge."

But now more are coming. Men we have not seen before, and more urgent in their requests.

SLIDESHOW: Church rushes to help orphanage in Haiti

 Â

The men from Lifechurch discuss their options, none of them good: Stop charging entirely, angering everyone who has come to rely on them. That idea is rejected. String an extension cord outside, drawing a crowd. Also rejected. The mission director, Ramon Crespo, settles on a third option: Allow 10 people a day to drop their phones off for charging, and then to come back and pick them up later. No one, including Crespo, is exactly sure how to enforce this.

Now any knock on the gate is greeted by three men from the orphanage, carrying mace spray and the shotgun. "If you have to shoot, don't shoot at someone the first time," said "house father" David Harris. "Shoot in the air. It's a deterrent. If you shoot someone, you'll draw a big crowd."

Shortly after noon, about 30 people gathered outside, knocking on the gate and asking for food. The orphanage staff knew they couldn't give any, because then there would be 1,000 people.

"No help is reaching this area," Crespo said, referring to the Santo neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, about one mile northeast of the airport. "No food, no water. No help. People are getting desperate."

David Friedman / msnbc.com
A woman begs Ramon Morales, right, for water outside the Rescue Children orphanage in Port-au-Prince on Monday. The orphanage staff and members of the group from Lifechurch in Allentown, Pa., have only limited supplies on hand and can't risk giving anything to others because of the security risk.

One outer wall of the compound is down, so as we sleep outside on beds and mattresses we are looking right at a man and his family who are sleeping outside in their home next door. On that side of the perimeter, he is our first line of defense. He also has a gun, and the orphanage is giving him food and promising him cash when we leave.

The men from the orphanage on Monday stretched razor wire that used to be atop the fallen wall around the neighbor's property, helping protect the outside of his property. The orphanage also gave a box of shoes to the neighbor to distribute. By the time they came out with the box, 10 more people had arrived for shoes.

But reports from farther afield were heightening concerns.

Regina Benoit, 23, who leads the three women on the orphanage staff, heard from her sister in Pétionville by phone that there is more looting there, and some rapes.

Another worker here, Anita Delcine, 23, said all her possessions were stolen from the home she shares with her 22-month-old son, and her mother, who is blind. They are moving in with another family.

Reports like these made Randy Landis, the senior pastor, worry that the situation in their relatively quiet corner of the city could deteriorate. "We have these children and these women that we're responsible for," he said. "We may have to evacuate quickly."

So Landis and most of the others moved the 13 children -- the 11 kids who were here before the quake and two young children of a staff member -- and staff on Tuesday to temporary shelter at the Love A Child mission, which has a large orphanage and medical clinic about 40 minutes away. Two church members, Ramon Crespo and Ramon Morales, remained at the Rescue Children orphanage to stand guard over the remaining supplies.

Interactive: Meet the Children

 

A second wave of Lifechurch volunteers is expected soon. A medical team of six plans to go directly to the Love A Child mission, which has already treated hundreds of wounded brought out from Port-au-Prince. Another team of six volunteers plans to help move the orphanage's food and belongings to Love A Child.

It would have difficult to take 20 people out in only one SUV, so a driver with a small truck was hired for the trip to the Love A Child Mission. The group had enough diesel for both vehicles and to keep the generator running for Crespo and Morales.  
 
The children were unaware of most of this. The girls helped each other with hairdos Monday morning while the small boys played in the garden with guns made from Legos. The oldest boy, Roberde, 16, had a whistle to blow if he had spotted an intruder.

At 10 a.m., Crespo called the children together under a tarp and began to talk.

David Friedman / msnbc.com
VIDEO: Dominoes is a favored means of passing the time for the kids at the orphanage. Click to watch video of them playing a game.

"This may be the most important dialogue of all," he said. "The first time I met you, you were in a house, the other place, and all of you know the things that happened there. We had to pull you out.

"The earthquake happened. Now we cannot live here. It's not secure. We're lacking some necessities.

"Now the only choice we have is to go to a third place, 45 minutes from here. A temporary shelter. It's going to be a little bit inconvenient."

Read previous stories:

An island of relative calm in a sea of chaos

A joyful reunion, but now what?

Armed, resolute, church group heads for Haiti

Pa. pastor 'expecting the worst' at Haitian orphanage

As he explained the moves from house to house, Crespo put red blocks on the floor to stand for each house.

He promised the kids they would be protected. And that he would take the orphanage dog, Petey.

While he spoke, the children sat quietly. It was not clear how much they understood.

Mafouna, a girl of 12 who wants to be a nurse, occupied young Julie, 4, by teasing her hair with a comb.

After a group prayer, each child went to pack a small emergency bag: toothbrush, underwear, a toy.

Donations to support Lifechurch's orphanage work can be sent to 1401 East Cedar St., Allentown, Pa., 19109. Or you can click here for a list of other charitable organizations working on the Haiti earthquake relief effort.

Looking for or have news on a child in Haiti? Click here to submit your information.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Before the massive earthquake struck the Haitian capital, a woman in Pennsylvania came to Lifechurch mission director Ramon Crespo with a check in hand to support the church's work. He said he didn't even look at the amount.
Å 
"I told her to keep her money. I didn't need her money," said the intense, bandana-wearing Crespo, 47, a career mission worker and part-time poet, born in Puerto Rico but living now in Allentown, Pa.Å "She could have sent the check, but she brought the check. She wanted recognition."

David Friedman / msnbc.com Mission leader Ramon Crespo prays Sunday morning at the Rescue Children orphanage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

The woman was offended, but Crespo, who with his wife, Luz, helps run Lifechurch'sÅ mission program, pressed on. "I gave her a list. I told her, what I need is for you to go to the store and buy 10 soccer balls. Buy 12 pairs of reading glasses and bring them to our church. You buy stuff, you have to go touch it. You remember better. It gets you out of your comfort zone."

After the woman settled down, "She did everything on the list," Crespo recalled, a smile splitting his salt-and-pepper beard and moustache. "I took her check, too."

Helping -- not just paying someone else to help -- is what the people of Haiti need. And it helps the givers, too. That's one of the philosophies of Lifechurch, which operates an orphanage in the Santo neighborhood, a little over a mile northeast of the Port-au-Prince airport.

Aid organizations don't encourage everyone to run off to Haiti, possibly making a difficult situation worse. The big organizations encourage people to donate to experienced relief groups, letting pros handle the situation.

But Lifechurch volunteers were here before the quake, rescuing children from what they said was a failed and abusive orphanage. Now they're here protecting the children they're responsible for and helping the neighbors when they can, not to try to save the entire country. Besides, Crespo, who has worked in Cuba, El Salvador andÅ Nicaragua,Å is a professional. He takes nothing for granted, assuming he will have only what he now has, while he looks for more. "It's not a lack of faith," he said. "But faith doesn't bring me more diesel."

At the Rescue Children orphanage, the volunteers from Allentown, Pa.,Å arise at 5:30 each day. On Sunday, although Crespo had a serious asthma attack the night before, he was back at work before breakfast, headed to a neighbor's house to distribute food. Church youths who go on mission trips with him call him "Major Pain," he said, because of his military-like work ethic. "In life I have a limited time frame. I'm afraid to not use it," he said.

Already the church volunteers have hauled out beds and mattresses and fixed tarps in the garden, organized a kitchen with propane and charcoal, and stocked a playroom for the 13 children here now – including two recent additions, the 2-year-old and 7-month-old sons of the orphanage's laundry woman, Crissiana. Volunteer handyman Ramon Morales, 35, helped bring out all the doors out of the house to support a tarp shelter for the family.

David Friedman / msnbc.com Ramon Morales escorts Mafouna, 13, and Marie-Victoire, 15, into the Rescue Children orphanage on Sunday to retrieve some personal things from their bedroom. With the house badly damaged, everyone stays outdoors except for brief forays in by the adults to retrieve things.

They do all this even though they hope to move soon to a more stable house. Chunks of concrete are still falling off of this one.

They have helped the orphanage's neighbors to the extent they can, bringing food to a house where an extended family of 15 is sleeping outside on mattresses, with no protection from the dust and 85-degree heat.

Church member Frank Andino, a former paramedic from the Bronx, set up a small medical clinic at the orphanage, offering care to about 50 people so far. Nothing major, a lot of fever, backaches, and small wounds to be dressed. It seems most people were either inside and killed, or outside and survived relatively uninjured.

David Friedman / msnbc.com Lifechurch volunteer and medic Frank Andino treats a young neighbor with an infected arm on Sunday. With the situation stabilized inside the orphanage, the volunteers are trying to stretch their limited supplies to help the wider community.

Pastor and Lifechurch founder Randy Landis, 50, began Sunday morning with a short devotional at his bunk. The text was from Psalm 46: "We will not fear though the earth should give way, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea."

The orphanage has enough water now for the children and adults to take showers under the stars at night, scooping water from a bucket. They have tablets to purify more water for drinking. They have diesel for the generator and SUV, at least for a few days. They have cell phones, Blackberrys and iPhones that work from time to time. There's talk of carrying the washing machine and filling it with water by hand.

For morning snack, everyone shares coconuts. One of the older boys, 14-year-old Macson, skillfully uses a machete to hack open the shells. The children drink the sweet water and spoon out the meat. The house dog, a mutt called Petey, battles for table scraps.

Each evening, as the neighbors gather for songs outside in the darkness, the children inside the orphanage have enough light to play cutthroat games of dominoes.

David Friedman / msnbc.com Stevenson, 7, plays in the courtyard at Rescue Children orphanage on Sunday.

The adults, who have been out in the city, know that most of Port-au-Prince is suffering far more than they are. "This is heaven compared with everyone else," Crespo said.

On Saturday, the church group drove across Port-au-Prince to the suburb Pétionville and the hills beyond, to take one of the mission workers to see her family's house, which turned out to be undamaged. The worker, Regina, is a student in international relations. She cooks and cleans, helps with the children and translates among Creole, French, Spanish and English. Like the three other Haitian women at the orphanage, she stayed for four days with these children before she went to check on her sister and nephew.

Her neighbor, a doctor, offered a vacant rental house about five minutes from the orphanage, with five big bedrooms. The volunteers planned to look at it later in the day and decide whether to move their operation. Ultimately, the group may try to take the children out of the country. "We could just take all the children to the U.S.," Landis said. "I have families right now ready to take them, if we could get permission."

During the drive across Port-au-Prince, heading out in daylight, back in the dark, the group passed a mass grave in a vacant lot not far from Pétionville. Onlookers wearing bandanas to cover their face said bodies are dumped four times a day or more.

On the main road, a little farther along, a little girl no more than 4 strolled along carrying a machete nearly as tall as she was. Women hauled huge sacks of potatoes and bottles of water on their heads, in the usual Haitian fashion.

A fallen highway bridge forced drivers to go around and cross the low water of the river to get to the city center. Nearby, a collapsed movie theater multiplex drew a gaggle of journalists, with people digging on the top of the rubble.

A makeshift tent city filled a church square in Pétionville. Thousands of people were packed together, with children being bathed in the street and women taking hand baths while standing naked in the open.

David Friedman / msnbc.com Thousands of Haitians camp in a square in the Petionville area on Saturday.

Children, and only children, were allowed to line up at a U.N. van to receive food. Hundreds waited in a long line with cups, jugs, bowls. Few other distribution points were seen.

Supermarkets remained closed, but some vegetable stands were open, offering cabbages and peas and plantains for sale.

Gas stations along the way were shut, so most cars were parked. Maybe Sunday, the men guarding the gas station said. A few stores have water, the purity of which is unclear. But just as before the quake, it's available only to those who can pay.

On the FM radio, in Creole, the announcers warned everyone to stay out of buildings.

There was no electricity, no light at all, except at places with generators: an outdoor cafe where people ate sandwiches, the U.N. camp and the U.S. Embassy, where about a hundred people waited quietly outside for help, watched by plain-clothes guards with automatic weapons. Solar-powered street lights were working, but hardly anyone stopped at intersections.

A hand-painted sign near the orphanage read: "Jesus Avec Haiti." Jesus with Haiti.

Aftershocks have diminished. Just one could be felt on Saturday, a short shake. The U.S. Geological Survey, which lists earthquakes of at least 4.0 magnitude, recorded 49 from Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday, four on Thursday, four on Friday, and one on Saturday.

"House father" David Harris recalls the moment Tuesday afternoon when the big 7.0 earthquake began. He was outside with all the children except Rodlin, a boy of 11, who came running out of the house. Now Rodlin is afraid to go anywhere near it.

"What would I have done if the house had collapsed with the children in it?" Harris asked, imagining the horror that might have been. "What do I say? What do I say? How do I make that phone call? 'We've lost the kids.'"

The children heard shouts from the nearby houses all through the first night. "A woman was screaming in Creole that her husband died," said Harris, a retired organizational expert, who runs the orphanage on a combination of principles from the Bible and Six Sigma management-strategy training. "The kids didn't know what to make of the noises. It's so different from what you see on TV."

SLIDESHOW: Church rushes to help orphange in Haiti

Å Å

The church team was still awaiting news from Haitian physician Hubermann Debrosse, who drove into Haiti with them, then went off to find his wife and two children. Even if their house was still standing, would he be able to find them if they're alive and in one of the tent cities?

Lifechurch is planning to dispatch a medical team of six doctors and six volunteers. They hope to arrive in the Dominican Republic, on the east side of Hispaniola island, on a charter flight late Monday. If they can get into the country by truck, they will rendezvous with a larger nonprofit, Love A Child, which has a clinic in the hills. That group donated 40 boxes of food to Lifechurch's orphanage -- fortified rice and ready-to-boil soy protein meal packages assembled by volunteers at Feed My Starving Children in Minneapolis. Love A Child also is using a van to ferry wounded out from the city for treatment, though it has no X-ray machine.

Read previous stories:

A joyful reunion, but now what?

Armed, resolute, church group heads for Haiti

Pa. pastor 'expecting the worst' at Haitian orphanage

Help also is coming from the Feed The Children charity, which has donated a shipment of Crocs,Å the ubiquitous rubber shoes with holes in them.

"On our last trip, we discovered the desperate need for shoes," said Landis, the Lifechurch founder and head pastor. "Women, children were walking without shoes. It's very rugged terrain, lots of rocks. We had taken some shoes donated from our congregation. We had noticed how Crocs were the best -- they're durable, they're washable. One of our guys, Frank Headrington, took it on himself to call Crocs. They gave us 101 pair of Crocs, and we had the children hand them out."

Now word comes of a new donation from Crocs: 5,100 pounds of Crocs, worth about $190,000.
The gift reminds mission director Crespo of a parable:

"Gandhi lost a shoe running for a train. He turned around and threw his other shoe back toward the lost one. His friend scolded him, 'You fool, why did you do that?'

"'Why do I need one shoe?' Gandhi asked. 'He who finds one, finds a pair.'"

Donations to support Lifechurch's orphanage work can be sent to 1401 East Cedar St., Allentown, Pa., 19109. Or you can click here for a list of other charitable organizations working on the Haiti earthquake relief effort.

Looking for or have news on a child in Haiti? Click here to submit your information.

ABOARD THE USS Bataan – The men and women of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit had barely unpacked their bags before the call came to deploy to Haiti. They just returned to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina five weeks ago, after a seven-month overseas deployment running training missions in the Middle East and Mediterranean.

Many were still on leave when they were asked to return to base, and get ready to deploy once again.

MCS Kristopher Wilson / AP Marines assigned to the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit board the USS Bataan in Morehead City, N.C., in response to the earthquake disaster in Haiti.

Cpl. James Beil tells us he had just grown accustomed to the idea of having his family around again.

"This was a pretty quick turn-around," he said as he bounced his five-month-old son in his arms. "And I don't really know what to expect on this one."

None of the Marines know quite what to anticipate when they arrive in Haiti, at this point. Their exact mission at this writing is still unclear. They are trained for any number of capabilities – everything from providing security to dispersing aid. They just don't know which they'll be called upon to do upon arrival.

Capt. Clark Carpenter of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit says his unit's strength lies in its breadth of capabilities.

"In a sense it's like a Swiss Army knife," said Carpenter. "We have that sharp blade for combat, we have that spoon or that fork to provide humanitarian relief, and we have the tweezers that we can use to go out and pluck out the bad guy in a precision raid."

But within 48 hours of being mobilized, they were on the move. The USS Bataan left Naval Station Norfolk at around 8:30 p.m. on Thursday and set out for Haiti. The amphibious assault ship, as well as three amphibious dock ships, will carry the Marines and relief supplies down to the earthquake-ravaged nation.

The journey should take two to three days, and their mission should be clarified over that time. Until then, the Marines in this unit say they are ready to do whatever is necessary.

After an arduous nine-hour drive from Santo Domingo, members of the Lifechurch of Allentown, Pa., finally reached the orphanage they run in Port-au-Prince. (Read the complete story in the next post).

Senior Pastor Randy Landis describes the emotions he felt when his team finally arrived to find everyone safe at the Rescue Children Orphanage.

VIDEO: 'An incredible, amazing feeling'

Once the excitement of the Lifechurch team's arrival subsided, the children at Rescue Children Orphanage sang a song of thanks for their meals.

VIDEO: 'God is good. He is good for us'

Read all the stories about the journey members of the Lifechurch went through to reach the orphanage they support in Haiti:

Pa. Pastor 'expecting the worst' at Haitian site
Armed, resolute, church group heads for Haiti
A joyful reunion, but now what?

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Shouts split the darkness early Friday as members of the Lifechurch in Allentown, Pa., arrived at the orphanage they run here to find everyone safe – 11 children and four staff members sleeping in the garden. The hugging, conversation and serious business of inspecting damage continued until just before dawn, when the just-settled roosters wearily performed their rise-and-shine ritual once again.

The nine-hour drive from Santo Domingo, while long, tense and eerily dark, proved less fearsome than we had imagined. Å When we arrived at the border shortly after midnight, Dominican immigration officers let us pass after a glance at our passports and a quick conversation in a back room. The Haitian side was unguarded.

As we neared Port-au-Prince on a back road that was nearly deserted, we saw rock walls toppled over, then whole houses down.

David Friedman / msnbc.com
Kids at the Rescue Children orphanage watch a generator-powered television on Friday in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Upon reaching the orphanage, members of the church group began calling out names in the dark, dizzy with excitement but wondering what they would find, having exchanged just a few quick text messages with the orphanage director shortly after the quake.

Their relief was palpable as they were joyously welcomed by the director, Dave Harris, staff members and the children -- Macson, Roberde, François, Jeff-Alande, Mafouna, Widlyne, Rodlin, Roger, Marie-Victorie, Stevenson and Julie – all shod in new green or pink Crocs donated by the church. All the kids, who range in age from 4 to 16, will give you a hug if you let them borrow your sunglasses.

After the welcoming, the church members quickly set out to examine the damage to the house, which they only recently occupied. They entered through an entryway marked with Psalm 27:10, in Creole, "Papa m ak manman m te mét lage m, Senyé a va ranmase mwen." In English: "When my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me."

VIDEO: Senior Pastor Randy Landis describes the emotions of his team's arrival at the orphanage

Some of the kids are true orphans. One of the girls' father and brother were murdered in a machete attack, and she still bears a scar. Another girl was found in a trash can when she was an infant. Two of the boys have no backstories at all; no one knows where they came from.

But others are economic castoffs, with parents who were alive before the earthquake, and may still be.

"There's a new type of orphan in the world today, where the mom and dad just can't afford to take care of the kids," said senior pastor Randy Landis, 50, of Lifechurch, an Evangelical Christian nondenominational congregation. As he talks, Julie, 4, soothingly cleans his bald head with a wet wipe.

In daylight, we headed out looking for charcoal and more food in the relatively upscale section of Port-au-Prince, called Santo, about 15 minutes from the city center before the quake. A church leader carried a shotgun, though no one appeared menacing. Up and down the street, people slept outside on mattresses in the comfortable weather, far from the buildings.

Many of the houses around the orphanage were pancaked by the quake. Just down the street, a young girl's corpse remained trapped in the rubble of one house where three died.

At a collapsed multi-story concrete building, dozens of people worked in clumps on the pile, swinging sledgehammers and digging by hand. The air smelled of smoke.

A U.N. truck drove past, carrying armed men wearing face masks. Neighbors told us later that the U.N. men were burying bodies in a nearby mass grave. The neighbors were upset, because the dead are not receiving individual funerals and burials.

Heading toward the Delmas area and central Port-au-Prince, we encountered a major bridge that was down and had to turn around.

But amid the devastation, signs of normalcy were evident. On the main street into the city center, some stores were open. The streets were less busy than usual, but still many people were riding mopeds or flagging down "tap-taps," as the multicolored taxi vans are known. Some gas stations were open, with long lines of vehicles waiting to fuel up.

Military planes and helicopters occasionally flew by as people carried water to their homes from a nearby tower or other sources, using jugs, buckets, any container they could find. Two boys at a soda stand popped open orange drinks. A neighbor's scrawny horse stood tied up in front of a damaged home, with no food or water in view.

The orphanage just moved to this grand old house owned by a Haitian living in Canada. It's still standing, but the concrete walls have large cracks and the adults fear it could collapse if there are more aftershocks. The children are forbidden to go inside and have to use a portable toilet in the carport.

The kids had just returned from their second day at their new school when the quake hit on Tuesday afternoon. Now, with the nearby Catholic school at least temporarily closed, they spend their days helping carry cans of vegetables and other supplies to the pantry and trying to stay busy. They have toys and games, though mostly they seem preoccupied with hanging onto the adults. The kids next door play soccer, but the orphanage's soccer ball deflated after it rolled into razor wire on the driveway, strewn there when a portion of the concrete wall around the grounds collapsed.

David Friedman / msnbc.com
Lifechurch mission members Ramon Crespo and Ramon Morales clear debris from a collapsed wall at Rescue Children orphanage in Port-au-Prince on Friday.

"We've had tremors all day," said Harris, 56, the orphanage manager. He's a retired specialist in quality control, and it shows in the organization he has imposed on the extended family now camped outside. "The house could go at any time. The children are pretty scared. Even the dog is scared."

The women have moved the kitchen to the garden, serving boiled spaghetti and sausage for breakfast, rice and canned tuna for lunch and plenty of hot coffee with sugar. The children have been sleeping outside, and the men are putting up tents for shade now, and shelter when the rain comes.

Paramedic Frank Andino, a church volunteer, has set up a small medical station. But he said he's afraid word will get out, and he'll be overwhelmed by the neighbors, exhausting his supplies. But the church group is offering boxes of sports bars to the neighbors.

Water is being rationed. No one changes clothes. No showers are allowed, except for women and girls who are menstruating.

Still to do: Stretch the razor wire across a broken section of the exterior wall to provide security. A church mission near the Dominican border has offered more food, so a trip Saturday morning should help restock the shelves. But fuel is iffy.

"One bag of charcoal is all we have left," said mission director Ramon Crespo, 47, a veteran of a mud slide relief effort eight years ago in El Salvador and many other rescue efforts. "After that, we burn wood. After that, we burn books."

Within a week, pastor Landis said he hopes to find another house to rent, farther from the city center, and to bring down a second mission group to help move.

The Haitian doctor from New Jersey who met the group on the flight down, Hubermann Debrosse, and joined them for the drive to the Haitian capital, headed off Friday morning with two hired drivers, hoping to find his wife and two children.

VIDEO: The children at Rescue Children Orphanage sing a song of thanks before their meals

After breakfast, mission director Crespo gave a pep talk, recited a prayer and led the children in a Creole song. He reassured the children, "More people are coming to help, and a lot of people are praying."

"That house may collapse," he said, gesturing at the grand facade. Then, holding out his hands to encircle the children in an embrace, he added. "But this home will never collapse."

Read previous stories:

Armed, resolute, church group heads for Haiti

Pa. pastor 'expecting the worst' at Haitian orphanage

In the afternoon, the children gathered to watch a video on a TV and VCR set up in the garden.Å  "Christmas in Haiti" was filmed by church members to show everyone back home in Pennsylvania how well the kids were doing in the new house. The video is set to a contemporary Christian song, "Fade With Our Voices," by Jason Gray. The chorus begins, "Does our worship have hands? Does it have feet? Does it stand up in the face of injustice?"

While the church group and the kids remain in relatively high spirits, the shock of starting over so soon after the recent move is an emotional blow.

"We showed this at church on Sunday," said mission director Crespo, barely holding back tears. "On Tuesday, we lost it all."

Donations to support Lifechurch's orphanage work can be sent to 1401 East Cedar St., Allentown, Pa., 19109. Or you can click here for a list of other charitable organizations working on the Haiti earthquake relief effort.

Looking for or have news on a child in Haiti? Click here to submit your information.

ON THE ROAD TO PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – What would Jesus do? Well, in these circumstances, he'd probably pull strings at three embassies, stock up on machetes, put yellow police lights on his vehicles and find a quiet place to cross the border into Haiti.

At least that's how Randy Landis interpreted his likely course of action.

"Our emphasis is to witness, to be the hands and the feet of Jesus," said the 50-year-old senior pastor and founder of the Lifechurch in Allentown, Pa., who is leading a desperate relief mission to the Haitian orphanage the church sponsors. "If Jesus were here, what would he do? I don't think he would be in America sitting and watching the television. If he had a way to get to Port-au-Prince, he would get here. He would be a first-responder."

David Friedman / msnbc.com Members of the Lifechurch of Allentown, Pa. tie supplies atop their SUV on Thursday before leaving on a desperate relief mission to the orphanage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, that their congregation supports.

It was nearly dusk on Thursday when Landis and three other members of the nondenominational church left the Dominican Republic city of Santo Domingo for the Rescue Children's Orphanage in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. Å Already, the 11 children and four staff members there have spent two nights sleeping outside, afraid to risk the collapsed walls of their home amid continuing aftershocks.

After loading the SUV with as many supplies as possible, Landis and the others paused for a minute of prayer, forming a small circle by the side of the highway, before beginning the journey. The trip to the border, on good highways through the mountains, was expected to take about four hours.

But the group wasn't certain it would be allowed to cross, and safety on the other side was uncertain. The State Department warned Americans not to visit Haiti and not to travel after dusk in the capital, Port-au-Prince. The church members aren't afraid to use guns, but they weren't willing to try and take any firearms across the border. Machetes and police lights would have to do.

"How many of you got a knife?" mission director Ramon Crespo asked as the workers finished tying down the two stories of supplies: 25 gallons of gasoline, sacks of potatoes, vegetable oil, bananas.

He then handed out hunting knives like boarding passes as the others clambered into the SUV. But he held onto "Johnny," his 10-inch serrated knife. "If you throw this, it nearly always sticks," he said.

The border guards from the Dominican side were said to be turning back many vehicles, particularly rental vehicles like the group's Mitsubishi, the last vehicle available at the Santo Domingo airport.

But the pastor had in his pocket a lucky card to play.

David Friedman / msnbc.com
Ramon Crespo, third from left, leads members of Lifechurch's mission group in a short prayer on Thursday before the group departed Santo Domingo to try to cross into Haiti.

On the flight down from Newark, N.J., church handyman Ramon Morales sat next to a Haitian living in New Jersey, Hubermann Debrosse, who said he has not heard from his wife or children — a 2-year-old son and a 20-year-old daughter — in Haiti since Tuesday's killer earthquake. Debrosse, who said he was a doctor who speaks three languages, was trying to make his way to Port-au-Prince, so he was immediately hired on as translator/fixer. It turned out that Debrosse's roommate from the Haitian medical college he attended works in the Haitian Embassy in Santo Domingo.

So on Thursday, before heading out, the doctor and the pastor visited the embassy.

"There were maybe 70 (or) 80 Haitians "frantically trying to communicate with embassy officials, notes, pieces of paper, can you find so and so," Landis said. "And inside it was just jam-packed, trying to get in to see an official. Wall-to-wall people. Very orderly. You could see despair on their face."

Hubermann talked to the guard, and "we were immediately walked right through the crowd that took us to the back of the embassy into an office where the doctor was. He immediately embraced him. He said everything in Creole. All I know is he gave us his business card, wrote his number on the back. I'm hoping we won't have to use it."

SLIDESHOW: Church rushes to help orphange in Haiti

Å Å

If they are turned back by border guards, there is a plan B, Landis said. "Our driver knows another way in without a checkpoint," which they hope will enable them to enter Haiti unnoticed.

The group had been offered a charter flight to Haiti from Santo Domingo. The pastor's wife, Maribel, has a second cousin who works at the American Embassy in the Dominican Republic, and the cousin's husband works for the Dutch Embassy. But a charter flight wouldn't have allowed the group to bring all the gasoline, propane, food and crates of medical supplies.

"The orphanage has food for maybe 10 more days," Crespo said. "They have rice, but not much else. Without this food, they're not going to make it."

Earlier in the day, the load on top of the SUV came loose, spilling medical supplies packed by former Bronx paramedic and church volunteer Frank Andino onto the side of the road. The driver screeched to a halt and the load was retied more securely.Å 

Now, passing a Burger King on the highway out of the city, the roads were smooth and the view serene: beautiful mountain peaks reaching into the clouds.

"Right now, this is all the easy part," Landis said. "Once we get near that city. … I hope we get there. If we can't reach our destination, it's not like there's a Motel Cinco."

Click here for more on Haiti:
Read previous story: Pa. pastor 'expecting the worst' at Haitian site
Want to help? List of charities

Ramon Crespo was rushing around Wednesday afternoon trying to pull things together before he and colleagues at Lifechurch in Allentown, Pa., where he is the pastor, were to try to make their way — somehow — to the church's orphanage in Haiti.

"We lost [contact with] our building," Crespo said after a magnitude-7 earthquake Tuesday crumpled most structures in Port-au-Prince, the poverty-stricken capital of 8 million people. He and three other staff members from the nondenominational church were desperate to get to the site as quickly as possible, taking with them food, medicine and a tent to house the 11 children and five staff members.

They don't know what they'll find when they get to the orphanage, which the church operates along with with Hope Point Community Church of Spartanburg, S.C., and Rice Bowls, a nonprofit ministry that partners with orphanages in underdeveloped communities around the world.

SLIDESHOW: Church rushes to help orphange in Haiti

"We're expecting the worst," said Crespo, whose mission is just the spearhead of an effort that will see his wife, Luz, and numerous other church members flooding the Santos neighborhood, where the orphanage once stood, in the coming weeks.

They're not even sure how they'll get there, because most flights to the country are canceled, and communications remain difficult.

Crespo planned to take the team on a flight Wednesday night to Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. From there, they hoped to find ground transportation and a route through the devastation.

Luz Crespo said the orphanage was hard to find even before the earthquakeÅ -- it had no sign, for fear of attracting kidnappers. Most likely, she said, the Life Church team will have to get to Santos and start asking random strangers where the Americans have the orphanage.

The Life Church mission is one of hundreds being undertaken by churches, service groups and charitable organizations across the United States.

At Three Angels Children's Relief in Salem, Va., Vanessa Carpenter was also trying to get to Angel House, the orphanage she founded in Port-au-Prince.

Courtesy of Jean Pierre Crespo

A child at the orphanage in Port-au-Prince photographed by Crespo during aÅ Christmas 2009 trip to Haiti.Å

Carpenter said a "good portion" of a house for handicapped boys and adults collapsed, as did the orphanage's new surgery center. Fortunately, all of the boys were safe.

Stories like that are why Ramon Crespo and hundreds of other Americans were working every avenue they could to get to Haiti. For his part, Crespo said he welcomed the support and best wishes of anyone on his mission, Christian or non-Christian.

"I appreciate anything we can do to create consciousness" of the plight of Haiti's struggling children, he said.

Click here for more on Haiti:
Armed, resolute, church group heads for Haiti
How to help: a list of charities active in Haiti

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic – We are sitting in a waiting area at an airport outside of Santo Domingo, just a short flight away from Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. Close, but yet so far.

A team of medics from a relief group has just returned here after being refused permission to land in Port-au-Prince. The Haitian airport is so overwhelmed that help is even finding it difficult to arrive.    

Haiti is desperately poor and staggeringly underdeveloped, and is now struggling with a calamity of still unknown depth and devastation. Haiti also, of course, is on a mountainous island (Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic). It's hard to imagine a worse logistical scenario.

SLIDESHOW: Earthquake rocks Haiti

Some members of our NBC News team have been here at the airport for more than six and a half hours, waiting. About a dozen small aircraft sit on a postage stamp of an airfield surrounded by lush rolling hills. The sun is bright. It's a beautiful day, but of course it's not really.

We hope to get to Haiti soon. Nightfall will probably make landing impossible. That's five hours or so away.

 I've seen some of the horrifying images being broadcast out of Haiti. I've heard colleagues describe the worst disaster they've ever seen. I hope the emotion of the moment has pushed the hyperbole. But I think what's more likely is that words and pictures won't be able to convey the true horror of what's happened.

Seen too many earthquake aftermaths

I hate earthquakes. There's absolutely no warning. Over the years I've covered more than my fair share and the human disasters that followed all over the world. In a remote part of the Philippines back in the late 1980s, I will never forget the image of a completely pancaked high rise resort hotel. I've seen distant regions of India that it took a day to drive to devastated – not just once, but twice. And small towns in Turkey flattened, also twice.

Closer to home, I lived in Los Angeles for several years and reported on and lived through a few quakes along the way. One hit in the early morning hours while I was at home on the eighth floor of a high rise. The building moaned and swayed. Afterwards, thin cracks appeared between the walls and ceiling. All was well, but home never was the same again. And then there was the San Francisco freeway that collapsed when the quake struck during the 1989 baseball world series. That was a huge story as well.

But Haiti's suffering seems far worse than any of that. It's a place where buildings weren't constructed to any modern-day standard.  A place battered by hurricanes, political instability and the daily onslaught of grinding poverty and need. Even the presidential palace, where you would expect some investment was made, collapsed. Reports are that the American Embassy is still standing, which is evidence of what a little modern construction can go through and withstand.

Back at the airport, we've just heard there's a "ground stop" at the Port-au-Prince airport. There are no planes landing or taking off until the skies clear. Now we are hearing the "stop" message applies only to planes leaving from the U.S. Now a few passengers are walking out to board.

Perhaps we'll be next. Next to head into a situation a colleague described as "biblical," full of unimaginable suffering and grief.

Click here for more Haiti coverage:
Haiti aid begins to arrive in quake zone
Amid Haiti horror, stories of survival and hope
Haiti earthquake: How to help

PORT-AU-PRINCE - This city is now the saddest place on earth.

Survivors of the devastating earthquake here are homeless, even if their homes survived the shake.

No one wants to go back into a building that could still collapse.

Instead, families, (lucky if they can find each other), are camping in open areas. Fields, soccer pitches, parks are now refugee camps.

But there's no water. No bathrooms. No food, other than what the survivors can scrape up.

And the worst of it: It will not change anytime soon.

As I flew over the city in a chopper, the heartbreaking scene of crushed sections of the city also revealed pockets of hope.

While some buildings toppled across streets making them impassable, other roads are intact. When the trucks begin to bring the relief supplies to the survivors, they will have routes to travel.

This island, Hispanola, also has a generous neighbor. The Dominican Republic, by comparison a wealthy nation, has sent overland mobile food kitchens to aid the victims.

I passed a line of kitchens that stretched three-quarters of a mile. They hope to begin serving meals Thursday.

VIDEO: 'This is the saddest place on earth.'

And then there is the weather.

It was in the 80s Wednesday, and it will be that hot again Thursday, but the sky's threatened rain held off.  The temperatures dropped into the 70s, and a breeze has made things somewhat bearable for the night.

If you've ever wondered how news crews cover a story like this, it's simple: We camp.

I have MREs (military Meals Ready to Eat), a tent and a sleeping bag.

We will be broadcasting on NBC and MSNBC for the next few days, and as the world gets a clearer grasp of what's happened here, the only thing that's clear is that this tragedy has knocked this fragile country so hard, any talk of recovery during this generation is unrealistic.