Here’s an update on Vanessa “Mama V” Carpenter, the Roanoke County missionary who has “a whole country to mother” in Haiti: She flew to Port-au-Prince on Jan. 18 and has since then been helping the USNS Comfort coordinate surgeries. Judging from her frenetic blog postings, she’s on a souped-up version of her usual overdrive — [...]

The numbers are not yet tallied, but the deaths could top 200,000. Dominican novelist Junot Diaz called the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated Haiti nothing short of an apocalypse. “The numbers are abstractions to us,” he said at a Harvard symposium last week. “The U.S. lost 60,000 soldiers in Vietnam, and yet that war haunts [...]