By Daphne Duret Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Saturday, Jan. 23, 2010

CITE SOLEIL, HAITI — As the sun began to set an hour after the earthquake, all the Rev. Astrel Vincent could hear were the sounds of people screaming.

The moans and wails filled the dusty air and surrounded both his church and the nearby city blocks, where he had begun the painstaking task of sifting through the rubble for survivors.
He remembers thinking that this is what it must have sounded like when the Egyptians in the 11th chapter of Exodus awoke to find the firstborn sons of every household dead. "I'm telling you, I have never experienced something like this in my life," Vincent said.

His church compound has become not only a house of refuge for the homeless, but also a place where the living have come looking for a reason to explain their suffering. 

It is the same quest for answers that brings people to the ruins of the Notre Dame Cathedral dear downtown Port-au-Prince, where on Thursday groups of people stared woefully at the hollowed cathedral that had once been a national monument, crossed themselves and kept walking. There were more questions Saturday as hundreds gathered and wept at the funeral of Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot, archbishop of Port-au-Prince, and vicar Charles Benoit, who also died in the Jan. 12 quake.

Of all the questions surrounding the quake that killed tens of thousands of people, left 1.5 million homeless and forever changed the lives of countless others, none is as simple as this:

Why?

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