Channel 4 News producer Hannah Storm outlines some of the memories that will stay with her after a week reporting the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake.
I have left Haiti, but it is has not left me: I doubt it ever will.
The images of a country on its knees, the sights, sounds and smells of death, destruction and a debilitating lack of coordination in the early days have imprinted themselves in my mind.
I will never forget the eight year old girl on the hilltops above Petit Goave, one of the towns closest to the epicenter of the earthquake.
Her wide brown eyes pleading with me to help her, her dry lips mouthed the word “water”, as she lay injured in the makeshift camp her community had established; her own mother dead, her childhood permanently fractured in a way I could never attempt to understand.
Nor will I forget the chaos of the makeshift hospital, just a couple of hundred yards from the mountains of aid in the airport, where Natasha gave birth to her baby Christela, in the ruins of a country, amidst the dead and dying.
Nor the bravery of Arron Rooks, the American man digging the dead out of the collapsed Hotel Le Relais in Petit Goave, his face covered in dust, pressing on through the heat and chaos.
I have experienced so much, but it is nothing compared with some of my colleagues, even less compared with the force of international rescuers, who have rescued 121 people from the rubble, and particularly the UK Search and Rescue crew who shared their camp with us and who are waiting to hear when they will end their mission to search for survivors in the wreckage of a country.
And I certainly can’t begin to imagine the cataclysmic effect this natural disaster has had on the people of Haiti.
And yet, from what I have seen, this resilient, largely religious, nation is picking itself up, dusting itself down, and slowly getting on with life. The truth is, it has no other option.
I remember what Alphonse Edward, the Haitian-American coordinator at the makeshift hospital, told me as the planes flew overhead nearing the runway.
“This is not a country with a plasma TV in every home and a car in every garage. Haitians will pick themselves up because they have to. They have before and they will do it again. They have lost the little they have. And they will rebuild their country, their government, their lives. It will take time, they will do it.”
As we take our final drive through the shattered streets of Port au Prince, they are already doing this.
Women sit on their haunches in the filthy spaces between the shells of buildings, selling bananas and cabbages. Men hang out of the vibrant rainbowed hued tap-tap buses clinging to jerry cans as they hurtle towards petrol stations with queues dozens deep.
Inflation has already begun to spiral for goods which are difficult to get hold of and because of the vast numbers of foreigners who have spilled into Haiti.
And all this as some bodies still lie uncollected on the streets and the smell of rotting corpses becomes ever more potent in the Caribbean sun, near the azure ocean.
I am not surprised to hear that typhoid and dengue fever are breaking out, nor that people are fighting for food as it is dropped into communities ravaged by hunger, frustration and loss.
This morning, sitting on the terrace of our hotel in the Dominican Republic, which we reached late last night, the adrenaline on which I’ve been surviving for the past week began to run out.
Sorting out my belongings, I find a Playmobil figure belonging to my three year old daughter. It has been to Haiti and back. That brings tears to my eyes.
In the Spanish newspaper EL Pais I read about Marie Jose, the 13-year-old girl, who had her arm amputated without anesthetic after she was rescued from the school where she had been reading to her classmates just before 5pm last Tuesday.
The picture of her shows a stump with the date of her amputation on it. On her forehead is a piece of tape, bearing her name. Her eyes are empty.
There are so many tales of tragedy, of bitter, heart rending horror, of humanity pushed to the brink, it would be impossible to tell them all.
The scale of this disaster is only now beginning to sink in as I am able to read the news reports on the internet and I sit eating the first fresh fruit – apart from two bananas we had in Haiti – I’ve had in days.
This has been the most difficult blog I’ve written all week. I keep imagining the earth is trembling again. I know the ghosts of Haiti will come back. But, six years after first living there, I hope I too will come back.
This country has captured my heart and head in a way I cannot articulate. And many of my colleagues and those I’ve met here feel the same.
The people of Haiti have been abandoned in the past. They have a proverb, “Bay kou, bliye; pote mak, sonje”. It means “The one who gives the blow forgets. The one who gets hurt remembers.”
I hope the blows stop and the hurt goes before Haiti gets forgotten.