The BBC’s Emilio San Pedro is one of a team working on a new daily World Service radio broadcast to Haiti to keep survivors better informed and to help the island begin to recover from the catastrophe.
For me, the opportunity to throw myself into working on a programme that was solely focused on helping Haiti was nothing short of an answered prayer.
That is because I have several special connections of my own with Haiti. I have many close friends from Haiti from the early part of my career in Miami.
And Haiti was also the first country I travelled to as a young Cuban-American journalist on a foreign reporting trip in 1991.
The first thing I had done that first night of the earthquake - before the idea of going to Miami to work on this programme was even conceived - was pick up the phone and call the house in Miami of Marcus Garcia, a former Haitian colleague with whom I had travelled to Haiti on that first trip nearly 20 years ago.
“One of my oldest friends told me she did not sleep for four days until she heard that her mother had survived”
Marcus, I was certain, would have lots of important news to share with me and would no doubt be able to help me understand the full scale of the disaster.
His son, Michel, answered the phone and I proceeded to introduce myself and say that, as he would imagine, I wanted information from Marcus on the earthquake.
Michel sounded extremely upset. He told me that, in fact, he was desperately trying to get hold of Marcus, who was in Haiti.
He said he could not get through and was agonising because he did not know what had happened to him, or his mother or any other family members.
At that point, something hit me, which remains with me to this day. This disaster had touched every single Haitian inside or outside the country.
I felt horrible. A wave of sadness mixed with embarrassment consumed me as a journalist for having called at such a crucial time.
In the end, it turned out that my friend Marcus had survived. But his wife had died and their house, everything that was so dear to them, had been destroyed.
A flood of images came to me of their beautiful and chaotic city, Port au Prince, which he and another Haitian colleague, Elsie, had introduced me to all those years ago - images that were buried somewhere in my memory.
In the two weeks that have followed, not a day has gone by that I have not heard about another friend whose relative - or entire family - has perished in the quake.
‘Unimaginable agony’
I distinctly remember a few days ago, getting into the studio to talk down our digital line to Port au Prince to Mario Delatour, one of our new programme’s correspondents. We exchanged niceties.
He told me he actually lived in Washington. So, was he in Port au Prince simply to cover the story, I asked No, he replied. He had had to return because his parents were killed in the quake.
Many of the Haitians living here in Miami or elsewhere around the world have faced unimaginable agony in trying to get in touch to find out about their loved ones.
One of my oldest friends, Magi Damas, a Haitian-American filmmaker, told me on the phone from New York how she did not sleep for four days until she heard the news that her mother had indeed survived.
Outside of Haiti, there are hundreds of thousands more like her.
Inside Haiti, there are millions who are trying to get on with their lives and find a way out and back from the devastation caused by the earthquake - not only in Port au Prince but to so many other cities in Haiti, like Leogane and Jacmel.
Restoring a nation
Our programme’s aim is to help the survivors cope, to learn to move on and to rebuild.
I think the well known Haitian musician, Jan Sebon, put it best.
He was speaking on Connexion Haiti, in a regular segment we have on the programme in which a musical artist dedicates one of their songs to the Haitian people listening back home.
Jan said that he believed the time for counting the dead had passed, as hard as it might be to accept. It was now time to move on and to stop focusing on the destruction - as painful as it might be and to try to find a way to rebuild.
If, through our broadcasts, we can help contribute to making that transition towards rebuilding possible then I think we will have succeeded.
**Connexion Haiti **is broadcast daily in the Creole language at 09:10 to 09:30 local time (14:10 to 14:30 GMT).
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