Family tradition

My sister was a devoted Red Cross volunteer. In the last years of her life, she spent a total of 534 days at disaster sites around the United States. She also worked with the International Red Cross Federation in the Balkans during the Kosovo conflict. She and her husband flew to Belarus and Georgia to monitor elections.

So there’s a certain satisfying logic to this picture:

In the background is the National Palace in Haiti. In the foreground, those are tents on the roof of a police station. Nurse Tattoo is sleeping in one of the tents at night. During the day, she’s helping at hospitals and clinics in Port au Prince.

My brother-in-law says that international relief work is like a bug. Once it bites you, you can’t get enough of it. I suspect that this is the first of many, many pictures I’ll pore over, trying to imagine what she’s experiencing.