It's one thing to speculate from the safety of your home what you would want to do or might do, but the experience of disaster is more than intellectual or even mental.
There's a very real physical component; you were going about your day and the Earth Shook. Everything just fell down around you and ON you. You might be bleeding, injured. You might have just been speaking to a brother or your child and now they are dead and maimed beside you. You hear the screams of your neighbours, friends, relatives. Everything you knew, is gone. And nobody is there to tell you it's going to be okay.
The body and the mind go into shock in these situations, and it makes people entirely unpredictable.
The strong become weak. The weak show previously unfathomable strength.
How would you react after four days without food, three days without water? Wearing the same clothes still caked with the blood of yourself and your family. No medication. No space. No escape. And no break or private place to go to 'gather yourself'. After about five days of living off of straight adrenaline and nothing else, I think I'd be exhausted and completely disassociated.
I normally have a "act first, react later" type of response to emergencies. It's kept me alive, but I've got a wicked case of PTSD. I expect many, many, people in Haiti will have serious mental issues in the coming years.
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Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
~Thomas à Kempis
"Be plain, good son, and homely in thy drift;
Riddling confession finds but riddling shrift"
~Shakespeare