Reporting in Haiti

The Star's own Joanna Smith has been doing an amazing job reporting from Haiti, including riveting, vivid updates via Twitter. Here, at Ian Capstick's MediaStyle blog, she tells us what it's been like to report from the devastated ground there. An excerpt:

It was only several days into my assignment that I realized this was far, far worse in many different ways. You get used to a thing.

On the ground, everything is so much more immediate, obviously. I’m here. It is so difficult to describe the stench and even harder to understand how one gets used to it. I’ve stopped wearing my face mask, stopped noticing it on my clothes and stopped stepping around the garbage and just walking through it.

It feels surreal, as cliché a term as that may be when it comes to describing a disaster zone. I often feel detached, or as if I am on the set of a movie or in a wax museum. It is a very strange feeling to realize that you are seeing the things you are seeing and not breaking down into tears or getting sick. It’s a strange sensation to feel fine here, but something I am at the same time grateful for.

Joanna, incidentally, is on her way back home to us here in Ottawa, and we're hoping that she's able to attend Monday's Hill Helps  Haiti event. If you are in Ottawa, and interested in being a guest or sponsor to this worthy event, get in touch with my friends Tim Powers, Greg MacEachern   or any of the folks  over at Summa, who came up with this idea just a week ago and are putting it together with remarkable speed.

Comments

[MyThought]

Tim Powers? I'll pass

[wascally wabbit]

Not quite the same emotion here as Mythoughts concerning Mr. Powers. Proves the man isn't all bad.
As to the thoughts that are plaguing Joanna Smith right now - I commend her for getting through it. Amazing what the human mind is capable of. Still - surgeons in hospitals and traffic police officers are forced to bite on that bullet every day. Perhaps citizens who visit the site of concentration camps like Bergen-Belsen or the sites of Volcanic catastrophes - or even long ago battle fields - must feel it - that sense that many anguished spirits linger there..and in some cases..the remains of their flesh is still tangible. But someone has to pick up the pieces - restore them - and be there after to remember!