Happy Stories: Haiti

This whole Haiti mess has been really depressing. So much destruction! But in it all, I have read stories of people stepping up to the plate and really caring for their fellow humans. Enjoy some of this beauty:

LONDON - A young British schoolboy has raised more than 100,000 pounds ($160,000) Monday for Haiti's relief effort by cycling round his local park.

Seven-year-old Charlie Simpson was so upset by the images of Haiti's deadly earthquake that he asked his mother if she could help him set up a sponsored bicycle ride around a west London park.

Charlie originally hoped to raise 500 pounds (for UNICEF's Haiti appeal with Sunday's 5-mile (8-kilometer) bike ride, but his Internet page was flooded with donations.

LifeChurch Rescue: Ramon Crespo isn't leaving Port-au-Prince. Though the dozen children from the Rescue Children orphanage are safe in the countryside, he and six other men from his Pennsylvania church remain behind, helping their neighbors with food, water, medicine and shelter.

The small group plans to stay for at least another two weeks, said Randy Landis, the senior pastor of Lifechurch in Allentown, Pa. The church volunteers went down after the earthquake to safeguard the children they were responsible for. Most of the group, including Landis, is now back in the States.

But no help has arrived for their neighbors in the Santo neighborhood, one mile northeast of the airport in Port-au-Prince. So the intense Crespo, director of missions for the church, has stayed behind, setting up a distribution system for families living under tents.

In the countryside, the 12 Lifechurch children have settled in at the Love A Child orphanage in Fond Parisien, "We taught the children how to play kickball today, lots and lots of fun," Landis said in an update on his Facebook page (registration required: ). "We played kickball for four hours."

The successful trip for Lifechurch depended on the kindness of many strangers.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - It wasn't long after Tuesday's earthquake leveled nearly all of the houses next to Claude Surena's that neighbors started showing up at his doorstep.

For years, the 59-year old pediatrician had treated the sick at his two-story hillside home near the center of the Haitian capital.

Suddenly, he was running a triage center, treating more than 100 victims on his shaded, leafy patio with food and supplies salvaged from ruined homes.Meanwhile, he keeps everyone at his house because they have nowhere else to go. He sent three patients in urgent need of surgery to a hospital on the airport road Thursday, but he took them back in after they were refused admission.