PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI -- In a pink blouse and unusually clean beige dress, Marlene Jossil goes about her morning work at a one-time perfume shop.
As she picks up the best things she can find -- items like intact tiles that catch her eye -- she makes certain not to touch the human remains that reach up through the rubble.
This is the new normal here. This is a rewritten definition of humans trying to make order out of chaos.
She comes down from the pungent debris, avoiding what should not be disturbed, and is asked, stupidly: "Could you have ever imagined life would turn into this?"
There's no emotional breakdown, or admitt ing it's too much to really bear. "We just survive," she says. "We have always just survived."
Last week's Montreal gathering on the crisis in Haiti promised to hold another conference at the United Nations in New York in March 2010. It won't be the last.
There are calls for Haiti's debt to be cancelled. More private charity donations will head to this country than, likely, any similar outpouring in the history of bad things happening to our species.
The line starts way over there to adopt the country's orphans, who may now number in the hundreds of thousands.
Few foreigners with a beating heart don't want to help these people, who did nothing to deserve this, other than be born on bad ground.
But all this has little to do with what almost every Haitian knows. The riddle of what this country has become won't be solved for a lifetime, or more.
And for that long, the new reality is they will now carve out normal days from an abomination. Weddings are taking place. Birthdays celebrated.
Vagumy Chateau reopened his designer clothing shop, in the downtown market place, this past week.
The jeans and hip-hop inspired shirts were circled by swarms of flies. You step down hard now most anywhere and they rise like black ash.
"No activity yet," he admitted of sales. In every direction, there is destruction. But the young clothing vendor along with other sellers -- hawking everything from Boston Red Sox hats to kitchen aids to orange peels designed to insert into the nostrils to help with the stench -- have created a new normal.
They pick through the debris, and build new stalls with what they find. From a one-time wine store -- where a box of cheap vino sits like a trap, down a hole in the insecure debris -- Jean Brisson Joseph salvaged a rack of eyeglasses. They will soon help their next owners to see this odd new reality a little bit clearer. We in the West talk about offering hope and a belief of brighter days.
But Joseph, a now unemployed shop worker who showed up at the rubble wearing his pressed work clothes, believes they are already getting used to this new reality.
Despite the worldwide show of support, he doesn't believe in a better Haiti. At least not for tomorrow.
"Before, we had a miserable country," he explains. "So we already didn't have such a good view of life."
But he and other survivors will all say, at least they do have life. And they'll take that and make what they can out of it.
