With Hope

Meg Laughlin: TAMPA

Most of the time, Magdala Joseph stays in the bedroom of her South Tampa apartment with the blinds closed, listening to music and reading books in French about raising a healthy baby. She is quick to tell you she knows she needs to get out, but the Haiti earthquake paralyzed her.

"Both my legs and my mind," she says in English.

Joseph, 29, and her husband, a hospital administrator, were living just outside Port-au-Prince, near the epicenter of the quake. On the afternoon of Jan. 12 she was nursing her month-old son when the walls caved in.

"I tried to shield him, but he was knocked out of my arms," she says.