Going home: In support of family and friends, Utah couple goes back to Haiti

CARREFOUR, Haiti — A tear streamed down Alda Honore's cheek as her brother-in-law described the dreadful way in which his daughter died. Her typically buoyant husband, Hernandez Honore, too, sat in solemn silence in the sweltering living room, occasionally wiping the beads of sweat from his forehead.

Dabbing his eyes with his unbuttoned floral print shirt, Frantz Felix, speaking in Creole, related how 24-year-old Danielle, a recent university graduate who worked at a bank, was at her boyfriend's house when the earthquake hit. Family members found her alive in the toppled building and dug through the rubble all night but couldn't reach her. They pulled her dust-covered body out two days later.

"She was a sweet girl," Alda said, breaking from her native language to repeat the story in English to a pair of visitors.

Similar scenes of sorrow would be repeated over and over as the Honores visited relatives and friends in Haiti for the first time since the Jan. 12 earthquake devastated the country. The visits usually ended with the Taylorsville couple pressing a couple of $50 bills into someone's hand.

But this moment was too tender, too painful to end with cash. Hernandez would return with money later.

Nothing prepared Hernandez and Alda Honore for what they would see and hear in their beloved homeland. Not the scenes of destruction shown on the nightly news. Not pictures in the newspaper of hungry Haitians pleading for help. Not images on the Internet of bodies lying amid chunks of concrete. Not even firsthand accounts from their own mothers.

Alda often wondered if it really happened. Did an epic earthquake really leave her country in ruins? Did it really, as the Haitian government estimates, kill more than 230,000 people, injure 300,000 more and leave upwards of 1 million homeless, her friends and family among them all? Did the shaking really break or destroy 250,000 homes and 30,000 businesses? And if it did happen, why aren't people getting more help, especially outside the capital city of Port-au-Prince.

It was something she couldn't wrap her head around, something her heart would not accept. Sleep did not come easily in the days, weeks and months after the earth violently heaved Jan. 12. She lay awake wrestling with what was real and what wasn't.