Some morning perspective:

At 9AM, I received a call from Tara, my producer over at RTL, asking if I was available this morning to talk about Brangelina’s possible break-up. “I’ll be there in about an hour,” she said, “but be warned: we’re coming to you straight from JFK after spending ten days in Haiti, so we might smell a little bad.”

While we set up for the shoot, Tara and cameraman Sergei described the flight back: they managed to find a ride on a plane carrying mostly orphaned children, and each adult was assigned several children to care for (that’s her on the plane with a couple of orphans). Most of the adults on the plane were adoptive fathers from the United States who had flown to Haiti to pick up their new children, some of whom had been waiting for years for their adoptions to go through but now were the unlikely beneficiaries of a tragedy that encouraged authorities to speed up the process.

Tara told me about a young woman she met - a journalist - whose four-year-old son stayed alive for three days buried deep in the rubble while she passed him food and water and kept his spirits up by talking to him day and night. On the fourth day, workers began their efforts to dig him out, and he was crushed to death by falling concrete. The woman carried her son’s body 10 miles to her family’s crypt, where she buried him. Tara told me about witnessing amputations performed with Leathermans, sleeping next to the pool at her hotel because she was so afraid that the walls would come down around her while she rested, and watching a man jump from a balcony during an aftershock.