PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Everywhere the eye turns and the nose sniffs there is ruin and stink, but the ear hears laughter amid the wails.

People, be they living in tents or the few houses untouched by this month's earthquake, invariably smile, even laugh.

In Petionville Plaza, a collection of tents and shacks, people crank up boom boxes, some light fires, not so much for the warmth, it seems, as for the mere comfort of a light around which to dance.

"I find them playing games -- dominoes I think -- singing of course, and selling their wares," said Eric Zane, a Wheeling, W.Va., medic who was working at the plaza as part of DMAT-Pa.-1, a medical emergency team based in Pittsburgh. He and colleague Jim Stupar of Lincoln Place were bandaging small heads, wrapping arms, and treating wounds from the quake in the small tent city.

The air of buoyancy in many of their patients was unmistakable.

"They're continuing their culture and their life. The reason they're here is their homes are collapsed, their houses demolished," said Mr. Stupar. "I've heard them singing at night. It's surreal, the whole situation."

No one is rejoicing in their fate. They are resilient, not crazy. Yet nobody seems surprised at his condition.

As if to prove this point, a teenage girl turned up under the wreckage in Carrefour. A French rescue team that found her said she appears to have been there since day one. Everyone here agrees it is beyond belief that she survived so long, but they cling to that news as if there is a need to believe in survival.

"I tell this all the time to people: suffering for them is nothing new. Their greatest asset is resiliency," said Chris Wolff, a Mechanicsburg, Pa., native who works at one of the omnipresent cell phone stores that are just now beginning to repair and reopen.

On one street, a water main has broken. Yesterday, a small boy took his flip-flops, ran to the top of the street, dropped them in the dirty stream and, laughing, raced them to the bottom. Women came to wash their clothes and, because there is no other place available for them, stripped down and bathed. It is one more indignity of fate for a people accustomed to a battering.

"These are people who have a history of suffering. Of political corruption. Of natural disasters. They are used to facing difficult situations. It's more than courage," says Loetitia Raymond, a worker with CARE, the relief agency.

Miss Raymond, who hails from Montreal, spent this week working with women affected by the earthquake. To say they were affected by the quake is to make a mere addition to a list of problems women in this country face.

"Of the eight women I met yesterday, four of them have lost their husbands in the catastrophe or have been abandoned when they were pregnant," she said. "They didn't look to be indignant. It was one more natural thing with the poverty, with the non-access to food. It was one more item among the others."

She reached for a word to describe it and, after a bit of searching, came up with one she thinks fits: transcendence.

At a clinic in Leogane, ground zero for the quake, nary a house is standing. The dead have been hauled away; there was little time for ceremony. It was dig a hole, say a few sacred words, and move on.

A group of young men sat on the remains of a wall adjacent the clinic, discussing an oddity of the disaster: "More men have died than women," one said. He did not know why.

The effect was to produce a new generation of children to fill the orphanages that have been sending children to American parents.

Among them are Ede Camei and her three children. Her husband died. She lives beneath a plastic tarp in Petionville Plaza and waits -- for what, she is uncertain.

"I don't know what to do with the children. I lost everything," she said. In the mornings, she rises and praises God anyway.

"God gave me life. I say thank you God, every day, for my life."

Last night, musicians were scheduled to set up and perform. Those with radios keep them on music stations. Men look a bit more surly. Any foreigner is likely to be swarmed, with pleas.

"What are you going to do for me?" one demanded.

A small debate arose outside the canopy that is home to Louise-Jean Delia. She squatted over a charcoal pit, cooking an aromatic chicken and gravy called poulet pays en sauce.

"The sun is very warm. It's good. I have a place to live and food to eat," she said. "It is my job to make things good."

And her husband is alive and out looking for some kind of work.

To Michaele Aubry, who has spent her life here, the formula dates to independence, when a Haitian general fought off Napoleon.

"Since we were born, since Haiti was Haiti, we have been used to struggle," she said. "They have this struggle but still they can live. They are living anyway, singing anyway, even if it hurts."

And, somehow, they are working, anyway.

Haitians have been inventing jobs. Relief agencies have been hiring, but not in numbers to meet the demand. Women sell cigarettes, bread, canned goods, fruit, ripe bananas and men hack the bark from long sticks of sugar cane to sell as treats.

In Carrefour, the largely demolished port of Port-au-Prince, a huge, outdoor market has resumed. People toss piles of cabbages and lettuce and plantains and everything else on the bare ground, chop it into shape and sell, tossing the scraps and waste into the gutter in front, where pigs root amid the waste.

Along the main streets, pickup trucks blare messages and music from the local cell phone company advising people how to restore their service. Even the poor keep cell phones -- often with no credit remaining, but handy still for incoming calls.

Water is a salable commodity. Small children run to the cars and trucks and "tap-taps" locked in the endless traffic along main roads such as Delmas, which runs between Petionville and the city center.

Tap-taps are public transportation thrown together from old buses, pickup trucks with cabs and even flatbed trucks equipped with canopies. Locals paint them brightly, often with religious messages such as "Thank You Lord," or "Dieu est tout Puissant" (God is Almighty). The more ambitious tap-tap owners add elaborate religious paintings of Jesus or the Virgin Mary.

"They trust in God, the tap-tap drivers," said Frantzso Adie as he waited at one of the stops.

The Haitians crowd into the things and take bone-shaking rides from one point to the next, the last passengers standing on bumpers and clinging to the back.

Nobody seems to fall as the tap-taps zig-zag through chaotic traffic where stop signs and signals serve more as ornaments than law.

Friendships are made and broken on long rides that cost an average of 60 Haitian gourdes, roughly $1.40.

Yesterday, people were clambering on, talking and laughing, even as the tap-taps hit the ruts and cracks, swerved around debris, and pushed on into tomorrow. The last passengers, as usual, clung to the back gate, stood on the bumpers, or held on to the roof.

"There's a common joke here," said Mr. Wolff. "How many people can you fit on a tap-tap? The answer is 'always one more.' "

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