The scenes from Haiti are about as dispiriting as they come. A country on the brink seems to have been pushed over the edge, a landscape of decaying bodies, collapsed buildings and a wounded and hungry populace. As Damon Winter, a Times photographer who witnessed the devastation on the streets of Port-au- Prince, said: “You just wonder how people get on with their lives with this much loss. The city will no longer exist in any form close to the way it was before. I don’t see how it can.”

But recover Haiti will, somehow. International aid has come. Bodies are being buried. Buildings will be rebuilt. Families will grieve their losses.

Researchers believe humans have evolved to cope with traumatic events and get on with their lives.

Though the Haitian psyche may eventually rebound, what shape Port-au-Prince will take is in doubt. The road to recovery is an uncertain one, but the path chosen can mean the difference between a return to an unhappy status quo or a brighter future.

When a massive quake struck L’Aquila in Italy in April, the emergency relief was extraordinary, Michael Kimmelman wrote in The Times. But as local officials take over the recovery, “the longer-term future of L’Aquila is in question. Shortages of money, political will, architectural good sense and international attention … threaten to finish what the quake started,” he wrote.

It is no small feat to reconstruct a city where roughly 110,000 monuments and artifacts were affected by the quake, or come up with the needed billions. L’Aquila was a gracious medieval city, a cultural hub and a university town.

“If we don’t reconstruct properly,” L’Aquila’s Mayor Massimo Cialente told Mr. Kimmelman, “it will be a shame on the entire nation. We will have another Pompeii.”

No grandiose plans for rebuilding were discussed after the catastrophic tsunami hit the coast of Indonesia and parts of India on December 26, 2004. It left more than 200,000 dead across Asia. Whole villages and families were wiped out. Relief workers poured in.

Five years later, the landscape is different. The flood of aid money - $12 billion to all affected areas and about $1 billion to Tamil Nadu, the worst-hit state in India - has transformed the region and its economy, The Times reported. Many are better off.

J. Sasikala lost all her possessions, including her mud-walled hut . She now lives in a concrete home with a living room, kitchen and bedroom. She and a friend told a Times reporter about their electricity and gas and the handicrafts training they got from a relief agency.

They are also homeowners. Government officials deemed that all new homes would be titled to women. Men drank and gambled, they said. Women were more reliable. The Times reported 50,000 homes have been built along the coast of Tamil Nadu, and with women listed as owners the social fabric has been altered. Men complained, but acquiesced. The status of women has been raised and many are sending their daughters to school. They have more control over household finances.

K. Maniplan, a neighbor of Ms. Sasikala’s, told The Times that he wondered if the village would ever recover. Now, he said, he thought in a strange way the tsunami was a good thing.

It may seem hard to imagine now, but could it be possible that some day Haitians will say the same thing about the earthquake of 2010?

TOM BRADY