I’ve been training with Emmanuel for about ten years. Most mornings, around 6:30 a.m., he pisses me off by urging me to do one more  chest press, one more bicep curl, one more “squat trust.” He’s Haitian.

I was watching CNN as I warmed up on the treadmill, as he walked into the gym this morning. Normally I’ll turn  off theTV and just listen to music as he and I go through my routines. Today, though, I wanted to watch the reports from Haiti. Emmanuel typically  ignores the TV so it didn’t seem all that unusual that he was doing so this morning. As the morning wore on, and images of the devastation flickered by, I kept saying things like, “My God. Look at that.” Then I realized he wasn’t looking. Purposely.

The only family he has left on the island, he said, is an aunt–a nun in a convent outside Port-au-Prince. Growing up there, his family was part of the shrinking middle-class, which means they escaped while Baby Doc was in power.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Sure. I’m fine,” he said.

I was working my chest when he surprised me.

“Do you know that Frankl guy?”

“Do you mean Victor Frankl? Yeah. What about him?”

“He said that we just walk by…that’s what happens in Haiti. People don’t see people so they can keep going.”

“You mean, they’re desensitized?”

“Yes. Sure. They don’t see them as human,” and he spat out the word “human.”

“To bear our own pain, we’ll often de-humanize those who are suffering,” I acknowledged.

In between squat thrusts, Anderson Cooper came on. A story about one house, on one block in a devastated country of nearly 10 million people. For 18 hours, a 15-year old was trapped in a building pancaked (and that word in relation to buildings is so evocative for me; I always think of the World Trade Center). Family and friends had spent five hours using one shovel and their hands to free her. As Cooper spoke, the family, friends, and the girl could be heard in the background.

“What’s she saying,” I asked Emmanuel.

“She’s talking about not being stuck. How to clear the rubble…I mean ‘dirt.’ ”

Finally she’s pulled out. One family member stands behind her picking through her hair, making her pretty again. I look up at Emmanuel. His eyes are rimmed with tears. I know he’s got two teen-aged daughters. I know that when his mother died a few months ago it was hard for him to even sit in the room (he told me at the time that in Haiti he could never bring himself to go to funerals. And there were a lot of funerals.).

Ten years together, pushing heavy pieces of metal together–I’d never seen him come close to crying before. I stood and pulled him close in and he wept in my arms. Like the strong man that he is.

I recommend reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains.