Pick of the day: Giving birth in Haiti

Today's pick is a dispatch from Haiti by The Washington Post's Theola Labbé-DeBose.

We are bombarded daily with images from Haiti, people waiting in long lines for a bag of rice, the pile of bodies outside the morgue, and miraculously, people still being pulled alive from the wreckage of collapsed buildings, all while aftershocks continue daily.

As time passes and images and stories proliferate, one of the challenges for journalists is to produce stories that capture the attention of readers who may have started to become numb to the tragedy.

Maybe I am biased as a mom with a small kid at home, but Theola's story about women giving birth in Haiti in a makeshift, open-air maternity ward was one of those stories for me. Giving birth and caring for a newborn is challenging in the best of circumstances, let alone in the midst of a disaster of these proportions. I read the story on my handheld without the benefit of photos, but I didn't feel as if I needed any because the story did such a good job of transporting me there.