Larry D. Arbuthnott ’10 was woken from his afternoon nap by his grandmother's worried shrill: “Turn on the news! I think there's been an earthquake in Haiti.”

As he came to his senses on that cold Tuesday evening in his New Jersey home, Arbuthnott begrudgingly tuned in to CNN. Moments later, he snapped into rapt attention.

“'This isn’t real,'" Arbuthnott recalls thinking. "'I was just in the country. Haiti? What do you mean Haiti?'”

But the situation, despite its seeming trappings of sheer impossibility, was starkly real on the television screen before him. The capital of his mother's native country—a place that Arbuthnott had recently visited for the first time over New Year's for a little over a week—had suffered a 7.0 magnitude earthquake.

A mere week had passed since Arbuthnott's return to the United States.

The cataclysmic earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince at 4:53 p.m. on Jan. 12 unleashed devastation in a country that was already among the poorest in the hemisphere. It came without warning, Arbuthnott said.

"No one thinks of earthquakes in the Caribbean. It's not like it was a hurricane—it's not hurricane season. It was like someone told me a volcano erupted in the middle of the island," said Arbuthnott, whose mother, on a bus from New York, had not yet heard the news at the time of his television screening.

But word has spread fast—landing on the front page of major newspapers, traveling into the confines of Harvard Yard, and even prompting University President Drew G. Faust to send a statement on Thursday asking the community to contribute to relief efforts on behalf of a shaken nation. And the Harvard community has done just that.

HANDS THAT HELP

Not long after the earthquake subsided, some members of the Harvard community raced to the home of destruction to provide the aid that Haiti desperately needed.

Two faculty members from the Medical School traveled to Haiti on Wednesday, joining the staff of Partners In Health—a non-profit Harvard affiliate—in providing aid to the residents of the mountainous Central Plateau through its non-governmental health clinics.

“We are well-established in Haiti,” said Andrew R. Marx, director of communications at PIH . “We have a network of hospitals to provide emergency assistance."

The relief efforts of PIH can be described as a two-pronged goal, Marx said. First, the organization seeks to strengthen the health care system in Haiti to facilitate the clinics' ability to attend to the influx of people expected by the rescue team. The organization is bringing in extra surgeons to staff the clinic and more supplies to stock the warehouse, according to Marx.