From my current piece at The Faster Times - Mexico:
Almost immediately, officials later said, inquiries began streaming into the tiny Haitian embassy located here. More than 2,500 calls, emails, or visits were recorded between Monday and Wednesday alone, said Moise Dorce, the ranking diplomat at the embassy. Those thousands is a remarkable number given that no adoption accord or apparatus exists between the two countries. And given also that so many children in Mexico as it is are homeless or orphaned.
For a bit of comparison, only about 300 such requests were reported in Brazil.
Yolanda Martinez, a 50-year-old housewife, was one of the hopeful visitors to the embassy last Tuesday. She said she had two grown sons, and was moved by the images of suffering in Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake. "I am a housewife, my husband works, so I would like, with all my love and with all my heart, to adopt a girl," Martinez said expressively, clutching her hands together. "I don’t have daughters."
Read the whole report here. Intense images at The Big Picture of Haiti three weeks later, including a private security guard shooting and killing a suspected looter, and a shot of several photojournalists standing behind a police officer, clicking away.
For more on that, check out this raw interview with photographer Daniel Morel about the news media saturation in Haiti, at Lens, the New York Times photography blog:
No, no, no. I mean, they're playing with people here. CNN is playing with people. Anderson Cooper is playing with people. They're doing show business with people's life here. I went to the hospital. They were there. People are complaining to me. The TV's supposed to be people's voice. They're not doing that here. They're doing show business here. They don't take these stories so seriously. I don't know why. Every single day, I come out on the street and I heard people complaining to me.
The whole Q&A, here.
* A couple more interesting posts I'm seeing at The Faster Times - World: "An Ethiopian Funeral in Beirut" and "America Abandons Manned Lunar Missions, India Embraces Them."
* Image above by Daniel Morel/Corbis, via Lens.