"Port-au-Prince: The Moment" by Mischa Berlinski

When it comes to tragedies such as natural disasters, the news reporters try to describe every aspect of the tragedy the best they can, to inform people who are unaware of what happened. Although the reporters try their hardest, viewers will never know everything that happened unless they were actually there. Experiencing a tragedy is completely different from watching the report on television, Mischa Berlinski would know. Author Mischa Berlinski attended Columbia University and University of California at Berkley to study classics. Both from Italy, Berlinski and his wife moved to Haiti in 2007 after his wife got a job with the Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haïti (MINUSTAH). Unfortunately Berlinski, his wife, son, and father-in-law (who was visiting from Italy) were in Haïti when the 7.0 earthquake hit in 2010. Berlinski wrote about his experience during and after the earthquake. He really focuses on what reporters reported and what viewers thought compared to what experiencing the tragedy was really like. For example, he talks about how reporters would ask about the bodies and his reply was that, "...at the time, the bodies were far less shocking than the collapsed houses." Berlinski wanted to notify his readers, those who only knew what they saw on the news, about the presence of being there during the earthquake. Berlinski described his experienced by using similes and imagery to make his readers feel like she/he were there with him. To describe the sound of the earthquake Berlinski wrote that, "it was tremendously loud-- like huge stones grinding." Berlinski writes about the aftermath with great detail, noticing how, "a women had been caught in the flatbed [of a truck]. Her eyes were open; the impact had split open her guts; she was covered in a film of gray dust."Although Berlinski did try to make his readers go back in time with him by using imagery and similes, in my opinion Berlinski did not achieve his purpose. He should have written more about the whole experience; if he was less brief he would have achieved his purpose.

Even pictures cannot get people to understand what the experience of the earthquake was like

Title: No name

Author: Jorge Silva Photography 

Author information from: http://www.berlinski.com/mischa/author/