Haiti is the place where people's prayers and money is now flowing, but for some it is where their hearts and memories spark.
For Jeff and Christine Raymer, they had a fitful couple of days after the Caribbean nation collapsed under its own weight, struck with a massive earthquake on Tuesday, centred in the capital city of Port-au-Prince. Jeff's mother Marilyn Raymer, a retired nurse, had arrived there only hours earlier to take part in a medical mission there with a half-dozen others. They had just arrived at their guest house when the shuddering rocked the island.
"It's funny; I wasn't too worried about mom," said Jeff. "Christine had more of a hard time with it. My parents were in Phuket when the tsunami hit there a few years ago, and we didn't hear from them for days and days. This time mom sent a couple of text messages fairly soon, so we at least knew she was alive."
Not everyone was, from the band of volunteers. The group's guest house fell instantly to the ground in a crush of subterranean violence so wild that all the water was projected out of the swimming pool.
One of the group members, longtime Raymer friend Yvonne Martin, had just gone into the house to change after a swim in that pool. The others came through the earthquake with minor injuries, but Martin was killed instantly in the razing of the house. Her body was recovered the next day, with Marilyn Raymer seizing her backpack from the rubble to bring back home to her loved ones in Canada.
Jeff Raymer grew up with such perils in mind. His parents did missionary work all over the world. He spent time in places like Papua New Guinea, as a child.
"They had pretty harrowing experiences," he said. "This is just one more chapter in their amazing book of life."
She and his father are already planning a trip back down, the need for emergency medical volunteers more urgent than ever imagined before.
It was that call for medical personnel that also took Nicole Callaway to Port-au-Prince, but this was 17 years ago when she was a young Prince George nurse looking for international experiences and to be of service to those in need. She found a small group similar to Raymer's and flew in with them to a country and a culture she called beautiful but desperate just to survive the day, and little has changed since then, she said.
"One street over from the airport you are into shantytowns," Callaway said. "There are areas of wealth, of course, but so much of Port-au-Prince is high-level poverty. They are barely prepared to live life day-to-day; they are certainly not prepared for an earthquake."
Callaway's team worked at the hospital that she saw on the news was at least partially collapsed in the quake. She also wondered about the surrounding villages they visited and set up triage clinics. It was there she saw people who walked three days to get their medical attention, but still arrived dressed in perfect white clothes, "the best clothes they had to wear," she said. She cleaned sticks, bugs and mud out of the ears of a deaf woman who was then able to hear again. She delivered babies, with tarantulas crawling about which was both a worry for her and bad voodoo to some superstitious patients. She saw a three-month-old baby die of tetanus.
Yet it isn't despair and desperation that defined Haiti in Callaway's mind, it was the transcendence of positive attitudes.
"You would see happiness, and it seemed unbelievable in those conditions," she said. "People laughed, they showed sincere caring, there was community, people enjoyed life.
"It has been all these years and it still strikes a chord," she said. "This is so sad. I admit I have been glued to the TV trying to pay attention. It is one of the most incredible places I have ever been, so the memories are so clear."
Prince George is now part of the global effort to raise funds and resources to help Haiti crawl out from under the ruins of their landscape.
