Sitting outside on the ramp this night I look up and see the golden moon, so beautiful, shining down in the darkness. But the beauty is short as I hear the sounds of suffering coming from the rooms filled with suffering patients---those who have survived the horror of the disaster, now trying to find tomorrow as the pain of today seems to never end. The young man lay with tears filling his sunken eyes, waiting to have his mangled leg removed. He grabbed my hand---take care of me---I love you --hugging me so tightly. The 13 year old carrying his little brother in to be treated, as his entire family had been lost. He sat almost disappearing into himself. I am just so hungry...so hungry. The woman whose eye was almost torn off.... The beautiful 14 year girl, her face half gone from full thickness burns, her mother lost in the quake...what will she do with her life? What will they all do? Story after story of so much suffering and pain, so much loss. The immensity of this tragedy is overwhelming, the immensity of the suffering staggering. I do not think that it is truly comprehensible to anyone who has not been here.

Yet even in all the pain there is hope.

I heard a noise at dawn and ran downstairs with David and Jeanne. We found a woman and her husband outside the entrance in labor. We were given the gift of delivering her little son--a beautiful window into the future, for they had lost their first 4 at birth. I put him to her breast and he began new life, as his father raised his hands in thanksgiving. All the patients lying on their pallets outside were part of this true miracle of life. My prayer is that these beautiful, kind and loving people can rise again from horror to enter into a new life of hope, some day. We must not forget them.