I arrived in Port-au-Prince knowing I would be able to go home. That set me apart from the people of Haiti.

I knew Haiti would be sad. I didn't know that I would spend more than a week feeling vaguely disoriented, my senses assaulted by the smells, the colors, the noise.

In Haiti you see suffering. And loyalty. And endurance.

From the moment the rented bus took the Healing Hands for Haiti medical team down the rutted roads where goats and pigs played on garbage piles, my system went into overload. There were no traffic rules and, as one member of the group said, "If there's room for a coat of paint between two vehicles, you're too far apart!" Pedestrians were literally quick or dead. It seemed like I was always on the edge of shutting down.

Still, how beautiful the people were: tall, lithe, with lovely cocoa or caramel skin, high cheekbones, big brown eyes. And ready, radiant smiles. They were clean, too, something I am at a loss to explain, because the city itself was anything but clean.

I'd been warned about political unrest and crime. Though our hotel guard packed an automatic weapon, I never felt I was unsafe. I felt oddly accepted and appreciated by people who are so open in a world that seems to want to shut them out.

The odors — cooking oil and decaying fruit rinds, human sweat and flowers and animals — seeped into my pores, as constantly changing as the kaleidoscope of color swirling around me.

In what was to be a sensory journey, a time of human touch and healing, the hardest moment for me was the one in which I realized I would be no more than a human camera.

I envied physical therapists Evelyn Frederick and Heather Read as they cradled babies and showed parents how to exercise weak limbs. Dave Randle as he tickled toddlers to take their minds off their physical exams. Dr. Jeff Randle and interpreters Chad Lowe and Jonathan Gifford as they talked to people in Haitian Kreyol, or Creole, sometimes patting an arm or touching a hand.

Touch is central to good medicine, with its probing fingers and gentle flexing. It's not part of reporting, and I felt cheated by that, in a country where hugs are often all one person has to offer another.

In an orphanage, the others could hug a child, examine her, help her.

I stood apart and took only notes and pictures.

We saw too many orphans, too many people with disabilities that wouldn't have happened where medicine was more sophisticated and readily available.

We saw a child who had leukemia, and we didn't tell his mother because there was really no point in a country without chemotherapy. There were too many unpredictables, like whether he'd be abandoned.