Darlene Etienne, who spent 15 days trapped in earthquake debris, was the last person pulled alive from the ruins. Like her homeland, she is on the mend. BY TRENTON DANIEL
TDANIEL@MIAMIHERALD.COM
MARCHAND-DESSALINES, Haiti -- One of the last people pulled alive from the wreckage of Haiti's massive earthquake, a 16-year-old girl who lived for 15 days in a tiny pocket under a pile of concrete rubble, still dreads sleeping inside.
Her back and arms hurt where the slabs pinned her down. She keeps to herself in her small hometown outside Marchand-Dessalines, where she returned after her release from the hospital. Even her faith has been altered: A Catholic, she now attends Protestant churches because many Catholic churches collapsed in the January disaster.
``I feel traumatized,'' said Darlene Etienne, now 17, from the front porch of her concrete one-bedroom home. ``I don't sleep in the house. I'm afraid of the concrete. I sleep on the porch.''
At least 132 people -- perhaps many more -- were rescued after days or weeks within buckled buildings, according to United Nations figures. They coped with crushed bones, rattling aftershocks, the smell of decomposing neighbors, dehydration and darkness. With nothing but time, they wondered if they had been abandoned. They contemplated death and communicated with God.
Some survivors have moved on, learning to sleep under a roof again. Others have shuffled back to the countryside, grateful for rescue but facing a hard-luck life. Some, now homeless, are busy trying to survive in hundreds of camps that popped up in the aftermath.
SO LONG, CELEBS
Haiti is still staggering, almost eight months after the 7.0 earthquake claimed an estimated 300,000 lives and made 1.5 million people homeless. Tents crowd public spaces. Rubble banks the streets. The celebrity-studded help is largely gone.
Reconstruction, once a rallying cry for the country, now comes with a question mark.
For Darlene, too, the future is uncertain. Her hopes for school and work -- a way out of her isolated village -- were crushed when the buildings came down. Her mother had sent her to Port-au-Prince as a household worker just so the girl could earn tuition. The quake hit nine days later. She won't go back now.
``I liked it, but after the quake I came to hate it,'' she said of the capital, so different from her rural upbringing. ``It's not the same vision. It's not the same way of life.''
But a farming town four hours north of Port-au-Prince on rutted, muddy roads has little to offer her. Men loiter under shade trees as naked children with bloated stomachs splash in rice fields. Skinny goats wander amid single-room concrete homes.
``Life is getting harder,'' she said. ``I don't like it here.''
Still, even when she's feeling down about her prospects, her gratitude remains strong to the team of French doctors who gave her a second chance: ``It was a good thing they did for me.''
TRAPPED IN `COFFIN'
Government worker Frantz Gilles understands the seesaw of emotions, post-rescue.
Pinned under a tax-collection building, the 59-year-old managed to use his cell phone to call for help, only to be told that he might have to remain in his ``coffin'' for up to eight days before rescuers could get to him.
``This was when I started to panic,'' he said. At one point, he despaired thinking no one would ever find him.
But in a country where much is promised and little delivered, the earthquake cut through red tape and politics. Rescuers from all over the world jumped in to help. It was a team of Israeli rescue workers who pulled him from the wreckage after four days.
Today, Gilles is back at work. Fresh from psychological therapy, he says the foreigner-led rescue restored his faith in people and gave him new trust in strangers.
``I've realized there are a lot of differences among us but only humanity matters,'' Gilles said. ``Human solidarity is present and real. It's something we need to cultivate in Haiti.''
For Magalie Fortuna, the earthquake -- which entombed her 10-year-old daughter, Francesca, for an agonizing 10 days -- became a path to greater spirituality.
Though she and her daughter now live in an oven-hot, tin-and-tarp shack in Champs de Mars, a homeless camp in a 42-acre public plaza, they both say only God could have ensured that Francesca survived.
On the day the earth began to shake, Fortuna dashed into the street but Francesca was trapped under their toppled home on Boulevard Harry Truman in downtown Port-au-Prince.
``I'm happy because I didn't die, thanks to God,'' Francesca said.
By the time her brother and other family members hand-lifted chunks of rubble from her tiny frame, her father had died in the disaster.
Fortuna was a casual Catholic before, in a country where religion plays a central role. Now, she prays three times a day.
``I see it as the work of God, that she was able to survive,'' said Fortuna, 40. ``I give my glory to God. He changes my spirit. My hope is in God.''
TURNING A CORNER
While progress has been painfully slow in Haiti as a whole, the disaster spurred some individuals to take recovery into their own hands. For Falone Maxi, who survived a week in the rubble, the earthquake served as a push toward new goals.
The 24-year-old student was at a vocational school in Port-au-Prince's Bourdon neighborhood when the building fell. Trapped with a classmate, Maxi prayed and shared stories, measuring the days by the thud-thud of helicopters and rumble of bulldozers. At night, all was silent.
On the seventh day, a Russian rescue team pulled the young women from the wreckage, alive. Maxi's older sister, Carline, was waiting in the same spot where she had watched rescuers extricate body after body.
Maxi was bed-ridden for four months after treatment at an Israeli field hospital for a broken pelvis. But her injuries weren't all physical: Eventually, she saw a psychologist for fears that became so crippling she slept under a tarp outside her brother's home, unable to rest under a roof.
Her mother, Dieuzana Joiaceus, 54, says Maxi still has frequent headaches. She has ``gotten better, though she hasn't fully recovered.''
But recently Maxi seemed to turn a corner. She's working as a secretary at a humanitarian foundation founded in part by one of her Israeli rescuers. She plans to study English and train in nursing.
But as much as she looks to the future, she's learned to relish the present.
``If you're alive, you shouldn't worry about tomorrow -- you may have only a few days,'' she said, in the two-bedroom home in Petionville she shares with her mother and sister.
Gilles, the worker trapped in a government building for four days, says he also feels a new sense of urgency, as he replays the scene of his entrapment over and over in his mind. He's felt aftershocks in his imagination and dreamed about dead colleagues.
Always, he worries about one thing: ``The possibility of another earthquake.''
But it is Darlene's story -- of a life pulled from the rubble when even the government had given up hope of more survivors -- that underscores the drive for survival, by a young girl and by a weary nation.
LUCK AND FORTITUDE
Her rescue was a matter of luck and will. Stuck under the wreckage of a home for 15 days, she said she survived without food or water, though published reports at the time said she mumbled something to her rescuers about sipping a Coke. Doctors say it's rare for anyone to survive more than 72 hours without water.
``I thought: They're not going to find me. I'm lost forever,'' she recounted, her voice barely above a whisper.
But a neighbor, Emmanuel Pompee, who happened to be standing guard over the rubble of his own home as the sun set Jan. 27, heard a faint voice coming from the ground, asking for help.
He called out and heard the voice give him a phone number to call. Galvanized, he urged others standing nearby to help dig in the rubble. When French military rescuers arrived, the neighbors had managed to move enough crushed concrete to expose Darlene's dusty scalp, her body in a tiny pocket surrounded by concrete.
The rescuers opened a hole to give her oxygen and water. A French doctor on the scene asked her how she was. Her first words: ``Doing all right.''
They brought her to safety 45 minutes later. Her skin was like parchment, her blood pressure was very low and she was severely dehydrated, the doctor said.
Though she has rarely spoken of her ordeal, she has a few keepsakes in her family's home that hint at her amazing rescue. On the walls, a plaque with a brass plate of the Siroco, the French Navy ship where she was treated. And in a cabinet, a folded paper photo of a blonde woman in camouflage pants leaning over a bed-ridden Darlene, tucked under blue sheets.
Today, as Haiti struggles to find a path to recovery, so does Darlene. ``Our lives are the same since before the earthquake,'' she says.
That isn't really true. Not for her, and not for Haiti. They both bear the scars of that day, on the hillsides, in the public squares, on a young girl's body.
But there is endurance, too. It compelled a 16-year-old buried alive to keep calling out for more than two weeks until someone heard her cry:``Save me, save me.''
El Nuevo staff writer Alfonso Chardy contributed to this report.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/04/v-fullstory/1809204/out-of-the-earthquake-rubble-remarkable.html#ixzz0yeU5ukXQ
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/04/v-fullstory/1809204/out-of-the-earthquake-rubble-remarkable.html
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