A team of 15 nurses, surgeons and other specialists from several  Bay Area hospitals have returned from more than a week in Haiti, treating  earthquake victims amidst power outages and primitive conditions in a  hospital outside Port-au-Prince. Members of the surgical team, who regularly work at Sutter Health  facilities in the area, gathered at California Pacific Medical Center in San  Francisco Tuesday to share details of their experience.

A nonprofit community health publisher based in Berkeley has  provided thousands of free materials in Haitian Creole to help give basic  medical assistance to earthquake victims in Haiti. Hesperian, which offers free downloads of community health  materials in more than 80 languages, posted Creole versions of its health  guidebooks just after the Jan. 12 earthquake.

San Francisco leaders are partnering with Safeway Inc. to install coin machines at prominent locations throughout the city to collect money for relief efforts in Haiti, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced at a news conference Monday. The machines, which are being installed today and Tuesday, accept loose change and give back a printed receipt saying how much was donated and where the money will be sent.

Haitians are fleeing their quake-ravaged capital by the hundreds of thousands, aid officials said Friday, as their government promised to help nearly a half-million more move from squalid camps on curbsides and vacant lots into safer, cleaner tent cities. Aid officials said some 200,000 people have crammed into buses, nearly swamped ferries and set out even on foot to escape the ruined capital. For those who stay, foreign engineers have started leveling land on the fringes of the city for tent cities, supposedly temporary, that are meant to house 400,000 people.

A San Rafael woman is recovering at home after surviving the  devastating earthquake in Haiti that destroyed a rural school where she was  volunteering, killing children she had worked with for years.  Barbara Wander, a retired San Rafael schoolteacher, arrived back  in the Bay Area late Tuesday night after spending a week helping earthquake  victims in Riviere Froide, in a mountainous area outside Port-au-Prince,  where she has volunteered regularly for the past decade at a school run by  nuns.

Workers are carving out mass graves on a hillside north of Haiti's capital, using earth-movers to bury 10,000 earthquake victims in a single day while relief workers warn that people are still dying of their injuries. Medical clinics have 12-day patient backlogs, untreated injuries are festering and makeshift camps housing thousands of survivors could foster disease, experts said.

The most powerful aftershock yet struck Haiti on Wednesday, shaking more rubble from damaged buildings and sending screaming people running into the streets eight days after the country's capital was devastated by an apocalyptic quake. The magnitude-6.1 temblor was the largest of more than 40 significant aftershocks that have followed the Jan. 12 quake. The extent of additional damage or injuries was not immediately clear.

Bay Area nurses wanting to join in the national response to  medical needs in Haiti are finding it difficult to gain access to the  earthquake-wrenched country. The Oakland-based California Nurses Association has helped  organize 8,300 registered nurses, including 2,700 from California, who are  ready to assist in Haiti, but is struggling to get the first wave of approved  nurses on the ground there, according to spokesman Liz Jacobs.

A Marin County woman who survived the 7.0 earthquake in Haiti is safely back in the Bay Area. Myriam Kaplan-Pasternak flew into SFO Monday. Her two daughters and husband, Mark Pasternak, were there to greet her. The Pasternaks, who own Devils Gulch Ranch in Nicasio, have traveled to Haiti regularly to volunteer since 2007.  All four were on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince when the quake hit just before 5 p.m. Tuesday.

The staggering scope of Haiti's nightmare came into sharper focus Monday as authorities estimated 200,000 dead and 1.5 million homeless in the quake-ravaged heart of this tragic land, where injured survivors still died in the streets, doctors pleaded for help and looters slashed at one another in the rubble.