Devastating story, as most recent accounts from Haiti are.

Some of your sentences in this piece are too short, featuring too much repetition, causing a breakup in the flow of the storytelling. I would recommend trying to compound a few of the sentences together, to help with flow.

As an example, maybe replace your 4th and 5th sentences in the first paragraph to something like: “She was forced to each lunch alone each day as none of the other women would speak to her.”

Where the short sentences really flourish are in places where being curt adds to the emotion. In this sequence, “[a] helicopter would come soon. But it didn’t,” the brevity of “but it didn’t” helps to drive home the devastation. However, I think I would add line breaks here to add even more to the drama, like so:

They said a helicopter would come soon.

But it didn’t.

It’s definitely not needed, nor is it necessarily proper grammar, just a personal preference.

I like this version better. It’s both easier to read in 7 paragraphs over 2, and I think it’s more dramatic.

There’s still a couple spelling/grammar issues keeping it down, but those are generally easy fixes. Overall, I think you improved it with the couple of sentence modifications and breaking up the paragraphs.

Thanks John I appreciate your help. I’m still struggling with your picture. Please tell me you are not one of those overachieving teenagers that knows so much more than me.

so sad, and I agree with JP, whose picture is misleading.. there are still some spelling/grammar errors, but I think you wanted it choppy as if it were a non-native speaker of English sharing her tale. I could not hold my baby and watch it die without serious mental anguish.

This was very nice, and devastatingly true. I think you need to put the comma inside of the quotation marks.

I sent you a note about the age discrepancy in the picture. Top right corner of the page, you should see a number next to Notes.

That picture was taken in the mid-80s, 1984 I believe.