LONDON – At first glance, it looks like the partial remains of an ancient mosaic or the garble of an out-of-order digital billboard. Then the scale of the work grabs your attention: It sprawls across three walls of a gallery in London’s trendy Chelsea district, stretching more than 40 yards.

Like many works of art, the totality of “American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (but not Including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis nor the Afghanis),” is revealed by standing back. But in Emily Prince’s installation each tiny piece of the mosaic is an artwork in itself – 5,158 portraits that chronicle the men and women of the American armed forces who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

Peter Jeary/ NBC News

The art installation at the Saatchi Gallery.

Each portrait, on a piece of card four inches by three inches, has been rendered by Prince from photographs used in on-line obituaries. Where no portrait was available, a blank white card with a name is used instead. The portraits are pencil sketches, with the cards themselves color-coded to depict the racial diversity of the fallen: light brown, dark brown, yellow, off-white. Some of the cards contain brief biographical details of the subject, others just carry their name, hometown, age and the date they died.

…(read more)

LONDON – At first glance, it looks like the partial remains of an ancient mosaic or the garble of an out-of-order digital billboard. Then the scale of the work grabs your attention: It sprawls across three walls of a gallery in London’s trendy Chelsea district, stretching more than 40 yards.

Like many works of art, the totality of “American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (but not Including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis nor the Afghanis),” is revealed by standing back. But in Emily Prince’s installation each tiny piece of the mosaic is an artwork in itself – 5,158 portraits that chronicle the men and women of the American armed forces who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

Peter Jeary/ NBC News

The art installation at the Saatchi Gallery.

Each portrait, on a piece of card four inches by three inches, has been rendered by Prince from photographs used in on-line obituaries. Where no portrait was available, a blank white card with a name is used instead. The portraits are pencil sketches, with the cards themselves color-coded to depict the racial diversity of the fallen: light brown, dark brown, yellow, off-white. Some of the cards contain brief biographical details of the subject, others just carry their name, hometown, age and the date they died.

…(read more)

By Bill Dedman, msnbc.com

NEW YORK — Ramon Crespo isn’t leaving Port-au-Prince. Though the dozen children from the Rescue Children orphanage are safe in the countryside, he and six other men from his Pennsylvania church remain behind, helping their neighbors with food, water, medicine and shelter.

The small group plans to stay for at least another two weeks, said Randy Landis, the senior pastor of Lifechurch in Allentown, Pa. The church volunteers went down after the earthquake to safeguard the children they were responsible for. Most of the group is now back in the States.

But no help has arrived for their neighbors in the Santo neighborhood, one mile northeast of the airport in Port-au-Prince. So the intense Crespo, director of missions for the church, has stayed behind, setting up a distribution system for families living under tents.

“We’re building little shelters,” Landis said. “The U.N. gave us tarps, and we found a store with 2-by-4s. You can see blue tarps up all around the neighborhood.”

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Unlikely though it might sound right now, there is hope for Haiti, and that hope is called Aceh.
As I discovered during a recent five-day visit, the Indonesian province — devastated by the Christmas 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami — has made a remarkable recovery.

I’d last been to Aceh shortly after the Christmas 2004 tsunami, which turned the coastal areas into a wasteland. Up to 170,000 people lost their lives in one of the most destructive natural disasters in modern history.

As with Haiti today, it was hard to imagine back then, amid the death and destruction, how the place could ever get back on its feet.

But five years on, and Aceh has been transformed, thanks to a billion international aid effort.

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By Robert Bazell, NBC’s chief science and health correspondent
 
There are so many organizations doing great work in Haiti — and most certainly deserve financial help.

But I want to call attention to one I reported on this past week. I know it well and have visiting  from there for decades. GHESKIO is a group of medical workers who have been carrying out heroic efforts  to combat HIV/AIDS for some 27 years. As soon as the quake struck, the group immediately took on the task of providing food, water, shelter and medical care for thousands from the nearby slums.
 
If you can contribute, please go to http://www.gheskio.org/  to donate money. Please don’t send anything else. They will use the money well.
 
When the organization began Haitians were suffering intense discrimination around the world because of AIDS. Under the Duvalier government in Haiti, it was literally a crime to mention AIDS. But these doctors carried on and, recently, they have been giving out life-saving HIV therapy to tens of thousands of Haitians. Amazingly, immediately after the earthquake they were able to resume giving medications to about 80 percent of those patients (probably close to the number who survived the quake), on top of all the other challenges they faced.

…(read more)