If you've been paying any attention to the news at all this week you will have seen that an earthquake of staggering magnitude pulverised a large part of Haiti.  The news coverage is shocking, the devastation immense.  Unfortunately, such tragic news stories are all too common place in our world.  From famine to war we are used to pictures of suffering entering our homes via the box in our living room.

I think we can all be forgiven if on occasion we feel slightly immune to what is happening.  Its too far away, its too great a tragedy to comprehend, it doesn't touch us personally.

I confess when I first saw the pictures, I was utterly guilty of skipping past them with a quick "Poor Haiti, hurricanes last year, earthquakes this year, they can't catch a break".  I'm certain I wasn't the only one. 

It probably would have remained just that for me, another tragedy somewhere in the world, but then my phone rang on Tuesday night.

By the cruelest of cruel twists of fate a friend from the past, who should have left the island the day before, was found in the wreckage of his building on Tuesday morning.  Nearly half way around the world his wife will be explaining to their baby that his father isn't coming home this week and in fact won't be coming home again.

Yesterday, after our little group of friends connected themselves again by phone, by e-mail, by thought across the globe, I pulled down my photo album.  There in the pages they were, my friends smiling up at the camera from a huge group hug around a dinner table.  Blissfully in love, several months from marriage, years from their baby being born and the tragedy lurking in the distance.  They were the fairy tale love story.  I know this, because I helped introduce them.  I was there when they bounced starry eyed from their first date absolutely convinced in love at first sight because it had now happened to them. 

As with many expat friendships, time and distance stretched between us with only sporadic news coming from mutual friends.  Nevertheless I am devastated for them.  That life could be so unutterably cruel.  I am shocked to my core that now two people are gone from my photo album, less than eight years after it was compiled and way, way before their time.

If you have any spare change this month, please consider donating it to one of the relief appeals for Haiti.  I will be doing so for a little boy whose memories of his father will now only be the memories of other people, in the hope that another family may be saved from such heartache.

In the Netherlands you can donate through Giro555.