Local and out-of-town nonprofits are seeking the donations raised in the name of the Red Cross from the city of North Miami.
BY NADEGE CHARLES
NCHARLES@MIAMIHERALD.COM
North Miami officials, who collected more than $100,000 for Haiti relief and told residents it will go to the Red Cross, will decide Tuesday what to do with the money, which has been sitting in a city bank account since March.
Mayor Andre Pierre said he has not ruled out the Red Cross as a recipient of the funds completely, provided the organization can meet the city's demands that it go to a specific project with little or no overhead costs.
At least eight South Florida nonprofit organizations have applied for the $116,000 since the city said it was accepting proposals earlier this month. Two of the eight are not in the Internal Revenue Service's database of charitable organizations, so if the city chooses one of them, donors' money wouldn't be tax-deductible.
A third group is awaiting approval of its tax-exempt status from the IRS.
The city has also received proposals from nonprofit organizations in New Mexico, New York and Massachusetts. Some of the applicants have been involved with Haiti for decades. Others are fairly new into the country, drawn by the catastrophic images of homelessness and despair. ``We've seen organizations that have been on the ground for over a decade and we haven't seen any progress whatsoever,'' said Harry Cyriaque, president of One Help One Haiti Ministries.
Cyriaque said his five-month-old organization which is waiting to receive tax-exempt status from the IRS, wants to launch an education-based community center.
So far, One Help One Ministries has sponsored two children through its education initiative, he said.
City Council members have indicated they want to identify a specific project like a school or a battered women shelter.
Meanwhile, Red Cross officials say North Miami deceived donors by adding months later the money needs to earmarked for a project before handing it over.
``I think if they're familiar with the way the Red Cross work, they know that's not our way of operating, said Julie Sell, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross, by telephone from Haiti. `` We don't typically allow donors to dictate specific usage of funds.''
Sell pointed out the Red Cross receives money from a high volume of donors each year, which makes it difficult to field requests to specific causes on the ground.
Former North Miami councilman Jacques Despinosse said the city should release the money to the Red Cross, although he is treasurer of Haiti Cherie Heritage, an organization that has also applied for the funds.
``I think the Red Cross have every right to get the money. The city needs to do what's right,'' Despinosse said.
For, Marc Jacques, president of Nord Ouest Environmental, allowing smaller groups to come forward to submit proposals levels out the playing field.
``I believe in grassroots organizations, the big companies always get the donations no matter what'' Jacques said.
According to state records, Nord Ouest Environmental, which submitted a proposal, is an inactive nonprofit organization. The organization also is not in the IRS database of tax-exempt charities.
Another organization, Camille and Sulette Merilus Foundation, also is listed as an inactive nonprofit organization, according to state records, and doesn't come up in the IRS database. A number listed for the foundation on its proposal was disconnected.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/10/25/1890529/north-miami-officials-to-make.html#ixzz13R89hbsT
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est TALES FROM THE EARTHQUAQUE. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est TALES FROM THE EARTHQUAQUE. Afficher tous les articles
lundi 25 octobre 2010
lundi 18 octobre 2010
$900,000 for a 3-bedroom ... in Haiti?
By JONATHAN M. KATZ, The Associated Press Monday, October 18, 2010; 12:01 AM
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- It's just two miles from where Dominique Tombeau lives today to the house he dreams about at night, but the road runs straight uphill.
Nine months after the schoolteacher's concrete home collapsed in front of his wife and 4-year-old son, the family and three in-laws are stuck under a plastic tarp that pours down water when it rains. All he wants is to move up, to a working man's apartment in the tree-lined suburb of Petionville. But every place he can even consider costs double or triple the $43 a month he used to pay in rent, even though he and everyone he knows has less money than ever.
Haiti's brittle housing supply was shattered by the Jan. 12 earthquake, which destroyed an estimated 110,000 homes and apartment buildings. Since then demand has soared, as the more than 1.5 million people who lost their homes compete for new ones at the bottom end of the market, and a rising tide of foreigners from the U.N. and aid groups flood in from the top.
The result: There are not enough houses, and not enough money for people to rent the ones still standing. More than 1.3 million Haitians live in squatter camps, facing disgruntled landowners and violent evictions, with no international or government plan to move or house them. The prices have everyone stuck.
"The type of house most people rented before was not built well. Those houses were destroyed, and the ones that are left are too expensive," Tombeau explained with the patience of a man used to walking teenagers through French grammar. "When they find a decent camp to live in, they decide they'd rather stay."
Before the quake, visitors to Haiti who only knew of its poverty and desperation were shocked to see the homes available to those who could afford them. Glass and concrete palaces in pink, peach, yellow and white hang off the mountains above Port-au-Prince like oversized candies on a green fruitcake.
Some fell. The prices on those that survived defy belief. One senator put up his three-bedroom with panoramic views for $15,000 a month. (Its nine Rottweiler guard dogs are free.) Finding anything similar for less than $5,000 is a steal. Want to buy? A three-bedroom with guest apartment lists for $900,000.
With his education and entrepreneurial attitude, Tombeau would be a prime candidate to enter a Haitian middle class. But as things are, he could not afford such a house in a hundred lifetimes. All his income disappeared in a crash of concrete when his school crumbled on top of him and hundreds of students. Some 35 people were killed, and he spent six hours under the rubble with his left arm smashed and pinned to his side.
After days in a Doctors Without Borders clinic, the skinny 35-year-old moved his family to an empty space in front of Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive's office. When officials began discouraging aid from reaching that camp, Tombeau took his $90 worth of donated tarps, wood and corrugated tin to the new camp on the side-street of Delmas 56, a rocky slope above a ravine behind a fast food joint and computer store.
The camp is called "Tet Ansanm" or "heads together," a Creole phrase for unity that's also an apt description of how much space people have to sleep.
Next door, behind a wall and guarded gate, is a two-story pink house now being used by the United Nations, which lost scores of buildings in the quake. On the upstairs floor is the five-person office of UN-Habitat, the primary agency tasked with the question of permanent housing.
The country manager, Jean Christophe Adrian, has been in Haiti since March, often working on a balcony looking over the camp. He acknowledges officials have been slow to deal with Port-au-Prince's most visible problem.
"So far there is no clarity on how to go about it," Adrian told The Associated Press. "There are a wide range of proposals which are being made but without really a clear direction on how to address the housing issue."
It was only last week when former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, the co-chairs of the reconstruction commission, held a closed meeting on housing at Bellerive's house. Meeting documents obtained by AP said that 85 percent of people displaced by the quake could be returned to neighborhoods if their homes are repaired or rebuilt. Ten percent would be placed in new homes in the same area, with the remaining 5 percent relocated.
Doing just that, even at a cost of $10,000 per family, would require more than $5 billion - almost the total currently pledged for everything through next year, without paying for health care, food or job creation, Bellerive told reporters before the meeting.
Meanwhile, of the total pledged, less than 15 percent has been delivered - and still none from the United States. Piles of rubble fill lots and block construction equipment.
The U.S. and others spent millions in humanitarian aid on home-assessment teams, but most of the properties deemed relatively safe remain empty because people cannot afford them. Little has been spent on new homes, with money going for tarps, tents and the sturdier "t-shelters" - made with wood and metal to better withstand wind, rain and tremors.
Hardly anyone has credit for a mortgage or construction loan. Building materials are more expensive than ever. And land title is governed by a broken system ripe for exploitation by speculators looking to cash in on reconstruction - whenever that happens.
Even money does not guarantee a house. A realtor with an office on Route Delmas named Athis Dupre said he lost half his 100 house listings in the quake. Rent is at a premium, with fewer people wanting to buy out of fear that a purchase would just collapse in the next quake. Streetwalking house hunters, who take prospective renters on tours for $12 a pop, say their pickings are expensive and slim.
But there is one group that can still make rent: Foreign non-governmental organizations, aid workers and journalists.
Down the hill from Tombeau's tent, on the unpaved, easily flooded cross-street numbered Delmas 33, the lower floor of a two-story with dingy, cracked yellow walls and possibly working plumbing rents for $1,250 a month - payable in a lump-sum of $15,000 for the year. Most Haitians, who live on less than $1 a day, could never afford that. But the Haitian-born owner doesn't want them.
"The owner isn't interested in renting to Haitians. He's always rented to NGOs," says his agent, Eddy Alexandre.
The Associated Press, whose house was destroyed in the quake, is now renting a three-bedroom home/office for more than three times what it paid before. And the New York-based nonprofit Voices for Haiti has abandoned Port-au-Prince altogether, moving to the sleepier, more remote seaside town of Cabaret to its north.
"I find it more expensive to rent a place in Haiti than in Brooklyn, and it's not just housing. The entire cost of living is very, very high now," said the group's head, Mario Augustaze.
The group had to bail out of a project because it was going to cost too much to house the volunteers, Augustaze said. The project was with Habitat for Humanity - building homes.
Tombeau is doing his best with what he has. He divided his tarp shack into a bedroom and living room, then put up a door advertising paid use of his $60-a-month wireless modem. He also spread the word that he could design T-shirts. But almost nobody wanted either. Out of cash, he canceled his internet account, and for now has given up on trying to move.
"I just want a house like I had before. I don't want anything huge, I just want something comfortable," he said, leaning toward a breeze coming through his stifling shack's open door. "If I had the money, I would look for one right now."
Associated Press writer Martha Mendoza contributed to this story.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/17/AR2010101701767_2.html
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- It's just two miles from where Dominique Tombeau lives today to the house he dreams about at night, but the road runs straight uphill.
Nine months after the schoolteacher's concrete home collapsed in front of his wife and 4-year-old son, the family and three in-laws are stuck under a plastic tarp that pours down water when it rains. All he wants is to move up, to a working man's apartment in the tree-lined suburb of Petionville. But every place he can even consider costs double or triple the $43 a month he used to pay in rent, even though he and everyone he knows has less money than ever.
Haiti's brittle housing supply was shattered by the Jan. 12 earthquake, which destroyed an estimated 110,000 homes and apartment buildings. Since then demand has soared, as the more than 1.5 million people who lost their homes compete for new ones at the bottom end of the market, and a rising tide of foreigners from the U.N. and aid groups flood in from the top.
The result: There are not enough houses, and not enough money for people to rent the ones still standing. More than 1.3 million Haitians live in squatter camps, facing disgruntled landowners and violent evictions, with no international or government plan to move or house them. The prices have everyone stuck.
"The type of house most people rented before was not built well. Those houses were destroyed, and the ones that are left are too expensive," Tombeau explained with the patience of a man used to walking teenagers through French grammar. "When they find a decent camp to live in, they decide they'd rather stay."
Before the quake, visitors to Haiti who only knew of its poverty and desperation were shocked to see the homes available to those who could afford them. Glass and concrete palaces in pink, peach, yellow and white hang off the mountains above Port-au-Prince like oversized candies on a green fruitcake.
Some fell. The prices on those that survived defy belief. One senator put up his three-bedroom with panoramic views for $15,000 a month. (Its nine Rottweiler guard dogs are free.) Finding anything similar for less than $5,000 is a steal. Want to buy? A three-bedroom with guest apartment lists for $900,000.
With his education and entrepreneurial attitude, Tombeau would be a prime candidate to enter a Haitian middle class. But as things are, he could not afford such a house in a hundred lifetimes. All his income disappeared in a crash of concrete when his school crumbled on top of him and hundreds of students. Some 35 people were killed, and he spent six hours under the rubble with his left arm smashed and pinned to his side.
After days in a Doctors Without Borders clinic, the skinny 35-year-old moved his family to an empty space in front of Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive's office. When officials began discouraging aid from reaching that camp, Tombeau took his $90 worth of donated tarps, wood and corrugated tin to the new camp on the side-street of Delmas 56, a rocky slope above a ravine behind a fast food joint and computer store.
The camp is called "Tet Ansanm" or "heads together," a Creole phrase for unity that's also an apt description of how much space people have to sleep.
Next door, behind a wall and guarded gate, is a two-story pink house now being used by the United Nations, which lost scores of buildings in the quake. On the upstairs floor is the five-person office of UN-Habitat, the primary agency tasked with the question of permanent housing.
The country manager, Jean Christophe Adrian, has been in Haiti since March, often working on a balcony looking over the camp. He acknowledges officials have been slow to deal with Port-au-Prince's most visible problem.
"So far there is no clarity on how to go about it," Adrian told The Associated Press. "There are a wide range of proposals which are being made but without really a clear direction on how to address the housing issue."
It was only last week when former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, the co-chairs of the reconstruction commission, held a closed meeting on housing at Bellerive's house. Meeting documents obtained by AP said that 85 percent of people displaced by the quake could be returned to neighborhoods if their homes are repaired or rebuilt. Ten percent would be placed in new homes in the same area, with the remaining 5 percent relocated.
Doing just that, even at a cost of $10,000 per family, would require more than $5 billion - almost the total currently pledged for everything through next year, without paying for health care, food or job creation, Bellerive told reporters before the meeting.
Meanwhile, of the total pledged, less than 15 percent has been delivered - and still none from the United States. Piles of rubble fill lots and block construction equipment.
The U.S. and others spent millions in humanitarian aid on home-assessment teams, but most of the properties deemed relatively safe remain empty because people cannot afford them. Little has been spent on new homes, with money going for tarps, tents and the sturdier "t-shelters" - made with wood and metal to better withstand wind, rain and tremors.
Hardly anyone has credit for a mortgage or construction loan. Building materials are more expensive than ever. And land title is governed by a broken system ripe for exploitation by speculators looking to cash in on reconstruction - whenever that happens.
Even money does not guarantee a house. A realtor with an office on Route Delmas named Athis Dupre said he lost half his 100 house listings in the quake. Rent is at a premium, with fewer people wanting to buy out of fear that a purchase would just collapse in the next quake. Streetwalking house hunters, who take prospective renters on tours for $12 a pop, say their pickings are expensive and slim.
But there is one group that can still make rent: Foreign non-governmental organizations, aid workers and journalists.
Down the hill from Tombeau's tent, on the unpaved, easily flooded cross-street numbered Delmas 33, the lower floor of a two-story with dingy, cracked yellow walls and possibly working plumbing rents for $1,250 a month - payable in a lump-sum of $15,000 for the year. Most Haitians, who live on less than $1 a day, could never afford that. But the Haitian-born owner doesn't want them.
"The owner isn't interested in renting to Haitians. He's always rented to NGOs," says his agent, Eddy Alexandre.
The Associated Press, whose house was destroyed in the quake, is now renting a three-bedroom home/office for more than three times what it paid before. And the New York-based nonprofit Voices for Haiti has abandoned Port-au-Prince altogether, moving to the sleepier, more remote seaside town of Cabaret to its north.
"I find it more expensive to rent a place in Haiti than in Brooklyn, and it's not just housing. The entire cost of living is very, very high now," said the group's head, Mario Augustaze.
The group had to bail out of a project because it was going to cost too much to house the volunteers, Augustaze said. The project was with Habitat for Humanity - building homes.
Tombeau is doing his best with what he has. He divided his tarp shack into a bedroom and living room, then put up a door advertising paid use of his $60-a-month wireless modem. He also spread the word that he could design T-shirts. But almost nobody wanted either. Out of cash, he canceled his internet account, and for now has given up on trying to move.
"I just want a house like I had before. I don't want anything huge, I just want something comfortable," he said, leaning toward a breeze coming through his stifling shack's open door. "If I had the money, I would look for one right now."
Associated Press writer Martha Mendoza contributed to this story.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/17/AR2010101701767_2.html
samedi 16 octobre 2010
Haitian earthquake survivor reunites with Fairfax County rescuers
By Gregg MacDonald, Fairfax County Times
Thursday, October 14, 2010
When a massive 7.0 earthquake hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Jan. 12, James Gulley was buried alive as the hotel he was in instantly became a pile of crumbled concrete.
A vaulted concrete ceiling had fallen, trapping him inside an 8-foot-by-8-foot portion, where he prayed he would be found.
Fifty-five hours later, Gulley was discovered alive by a rescue team that included members of the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue squad.
On Oct. 5, Gulley traveled to Fairfax County and was reunited with three of his rescuers.
During a presentation at Fairfax United Methodist Church in Fairfax City, Gulley related his ordeal as the rescue workers sat in the audience, listening intently to the story of the man whose life they helped save.
Gulley, 64, is a Colorado missionary who specializes in sustainable agriculture practices. He has a doctorate in international relations.
Gulley was in Haiti as part of a three-person team from the Board of Global Ministries, part of the United Methodist Church. He and two Methodist reverends, Sam Dixon and Clint Rabb, were on their way to a meeting addressing medical and agricultural services in the Montana Hotel when the earthquake hit.
"There was no time to think," Gulley said. "The floor came up, and then the ceiling came down, all within seconds. The sensation was somewhat like being on a high-speed roller coaster."
Gulley said he fell behind a large wooden reservation desk that took the brunt of the ceiling's force when it fell.
"After a few minutes, I could see that Sam and Clint were in the same chamber with me," Gulley said. "They both told me that their legs were broken. Sam's legs were actually crushed under the weight of fallen concrete pillars. He was in a lot of pain." Gulley said two other people, Sarla Chand and Rick Santos of Interchurch Medical Assistance, also were under the same ceiling section.
"I immediately checked my cellphone but had no signal," Gulley said. "None of us did."
The five had no choice but to await rescue efforts as days went by. For food, they shared one Tootsie-Roll Pop. For water, each person drank his own urine, Gulley said.
"Everyone prayed," he said.
After 55 hours, rescuers arrived and began digging the group out, cutting through the concrete with heavy equipment. Gulley, Chand and Santos were pulled out alive. Dixon and Rabb did not survive.
Among the rescuers were William Thurston and William Moreland of the Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue Team.
"We were part of Blue Squad One that helped the French team recover survivors from the Montana Hotel," Thurston said.
"It's not something I will ever forget," Moreland said.
At Fairfax United Methodist Church, Gulley was reunited with Thurston and Moreland, along with their chief, Bob Zoldos, who was administratively involved in the rescue.
"I am eternally grateful to these gentlemen," Gulley said. "It was really humbling to see these young men risking their lives to save others. They were risking just as much as anyone else in the aftermath of that horrendous earthquake. Several aftershocks occurred, but these guys just kept going, rescuing the lives of others."
Today, through the United Methodist Committee on Relief, Gulley is again attempting to teach Haitians sustainable agriculture practices. He has been back to Haiti several times since the January earthquake and plans on returning again.
"It is amazing to think how many more people's lives may be saved by the fact that this one man survived the earthquake," Zoldos said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/13/AR2010101302953_2.html
Thursday, October 14, 2010
When a massive 7.0 earthquake hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Jan. 12, James Gulley was buried alive as the hotel he was in instantly became a pile of crumbled concrete.
A vaulted concrete ceiling had fallen, trapping him inside an 8-foot-by-8-foot portion, where he prayed he would be found.
Fifty-five hours later, Gulley was discovered alive by a rescue team that included members of the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue squad.
On Oct. 5, Gulley traveled to Fairfax County and was reunited with three of his rescuers.
During a presentation at Fairfax United Methodist Church in Fairfax City, Gulley related his ordeal as the rescue workers sat in the audience, listening intently to the story of the man whose life they helped save.
Gulley, 64, is a Colorado missionary who specializes in sustainable agriculture practices. He has a doctorate in international relations.
Gulley was in Haiti as part of a three-person team from the Board of Global Ministries, part of the United Methodist Church. He and two Methodist reverends, Sam Dixon and Clint Rabb, were on their way to a meeting addressing medical and agricultural services in the Montana Hotel when the earthquake hit.
"There was no time to think," Gulley said. "The floor came up, and then the ceiling came down, all within seconds. The sensation was somewhat like being on a high-speed roller coaster."
Gulley said he fell behind a large wooden reservation desk that took the brunt of the ceiling's force when it fell.
"After a few minutes, I could see that Sam and Clint were in the same chamber with me," Gulley said. "They both told me that their legs were broken. Sam's legs were actually crushed under the weight of fallen concrete pillars. He was in a lot of pain." Gulley said two other people, Sarla Chand and Rick Santos of Interchurch Medical Assistance, also were under the same ceiling section.
"I immediately checked my cellphone but had no signal," Gulley said. "None of us did."
The five had no choice but to await rescue efforts as days went by. For food, they shared one Tootsie-Roll Pop. For water, each person drank his own urine, Gulley said.
"Everyone prayed," he said.
After 55 hours, rescuers arrived and began digging the group out, cutting through the concrete with heavy equipment. Gulley, Chand and Santos were pulled out alive. Dixon and Rabb did not survive.
Among the rescuers were William Thurston and William Moreland of the Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue Team.
"We were part of Blue Squad One that helped the French team recover survivors from the Montana Hotel," Thurston said.
"It's not something I will ever forget," Moreland said.
At Fairfax United Methodist Church, Gulley was reunited with Thurston and Moreland, along with their chief, Bob Zoldos, who was administratively involved in the rescue.
"I am eternally grateful to these gentlemen," Gulley said. "It was really humbling to see these young men risking their lives to save others. They were risking just as much as anyone else in the aftermath of that horrendous earthquake. Several aftershocks occurred, but these guys just kept going, rescuing the lives of others."
Today, through the United Methodist Committee on Relief, Gulley is again attempting to teach Haitians sustainable agriculture practices. He has been back to Haiti several times since the January earthquake and plans on returning again.
"It is amazing to think how many more people's lives may be saved by the fact that this one man survived the earthquake," Zoldos said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/13/AR2010101302953_2.html
Maryland pastor's family stranded in Haiti after deadly earthquake
When a 7.0 earthquake hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 12, it would leave Haitian immigrant and Silver Spring resident William Saint-Hilaire wondering how he'd be able to continue on without his family. By Theola Labbé-DeBose and Wil Haygood
Thursday, January 21, 2010
At 5:30 on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 12, William Saint-Hilaire rose from his tiny Silver Spring basement apartment to get ready for work. By 2 o'clock, he had finished at his job installing sprinkler systems for a company in Bethesda and returned home for a bite. A short while later, he left for a 4:45 appointment at Montgomery County Community College to meet with an academic counselor about an English course he hoped to take.
"I was sitting there," he recalls, "talking to the counselor, and my cellphone started going off." He had the phone on vibrate. He did not want to be rude by answering it, so he let it go.
In the hallway after the meeting, Saint-Hilaire finally pulled the cellphone from his pocket. "It was a member from my church. She said, 'There's been an earthquake in Haiti! In Port-au-Prince!' " Saint-Hilaire ran to his car and raced toward his church in Adelphi. He pulled up in the parking lot of Eglise Baptiste du Calvaire where he is an assistant pastor, and rushed inside. On the television in a church office he saw images of destruction, of the dead and barely alive. The people around him seemed to suddenly recede from his line of vision. Within moments, an eerie calm settled inside him.
His wife and six children lived in a small house in Petionville in Port-au-Prince, where the 7.0 earthquake had struck. And so Saint-Hilaire knew what he knew: "My family is dead," he uttered to himself. "They are no more."
Lissa, his wife, and their children, Billy, 16, Bella, 15, Bello, 14, Benedict, 13, and the lovely and rambunctious 8-year-old twins, Belline and Bellinda. Gone. As if clipped from all the picture frames inside his basement apartment. "They could not survive that."
And with this belief overtaking him, Saint-Hilaire shuddered and his eyes went blank as he seemed to rise up and away from his own limp body. Weightless. "I could no longer tell if I was on the ground -- or in the air."
Dinnertime was nearing and Lissa Saint-Hilaire was in the family's house preparing a meal for the children and a couple of neighbors. She had just finished cooking. Bella was upstairs with her and the others were in the basement, playing their musical instruments.
Then, she recalls: "I felt the earth move."
A rumble, and booming sounds. It was as if a giant bulldozer had come to life beneath the ground.
Her screaming seemed to be in the air before it left her throat. She heard her children's footsteps.
"Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!"
Six sets of terrified eyes. Books and food tumbled from shelves. Pictures, ceramic figures, candles clattered to the floor. Windows shattered. Sounds unlike any they'd ever heard: horror's soundtrack.
They ran to the roof. They could see buildings collapsing and slabs of brick falling. They rushed back downstairs. As if frozen, they crouched together in the living room. They began to pray, hoping God would hear. But with more booming, God's ears seemed a mighty long way away. "The blood of Jesus! The blood of Jesus!" one of the dinner guests cried out.
Lissa had to protect her children.
"Mommy! Mommy!"
Wind coming through the windows blew things about. Like baby sheep, the children scooted close to their mother. They thought the house might cave in. They threw shoes, a Bible, birth certificates, passports into a green pillowcase. They ran out, turned up an alley, roped together by their own sets of hands. Brick walls were falling. The earth had stopped moving, but things above it had not. They hurried aimlessly down another street.
"Mommy!"
It was Belline; then Bellinda; then Bello. Everyone screaming "Mommy!"
Out of breath, they stopped. And they saw it: Death, dying, howling. Little limbs as still as store dollbabies. Longer legs protruding from buildings and twisting like worms in mud.
The kids shuddered.
The falling ash was blinding them. The blind leading the blind.
Bella looked at Benedict who looked at Billy. Lissa counted her six children. One by one, ending with her inseparable twins. And, with dead bodies lying all around her, she knew what she knew: They were among the undead.
Theirs was a classical Haitian love story tinged with the intrigue and danger that have haunted the island nation for decades.
William Saint-Hilaire first met Lissa Jacquet in 1987 at church in Haiti. He was teaching junior high school math and some English. They were married five years later. Lissa liked that William was "a man of God," who also was doing some church ministry. They purchased a house -- No. 3 on Perdrix -- in Petionville. It had two floors and two bedrooms. They were able to make some additions over the years, supplemented by money Lissa earned as a hotel maid.
In 2001, backed by the United States government, former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was returned to power in Haiti. His reign was fraught with controversy and accusations by human rights activists of skullduggery and thuggishness.
In time, William found himself speaking against the Aristide government in class. He was warned to stop. Authorities summoned him for questioning more than once. Then came the day in early 2002 when a fellow teacher, also outspoken, disappeared. In early 2003 Lissa, who had become increasingly worried about her husband's political stance, told him he should leave Haiti or risk not living to see his children grow up. At the airport, the children howled as Papi disappeared into the skies.
He settled first in Brooklyn, where he met a Haitian exile group, which helped him get to Silver Spring. He began working and sending money home to his family. He never let more than two days go by without calling home, and the voices of his wife and six children filled him with joy. For the past year, he has been working with an immigration lawyer to get visas so his family can come join him.
When Saint-Hilaire, 46, regained his equilibrium at the church on Jan. 12 in the hours after the earthquake, he started phoning his wife's number. It was as if the calls were landing inside of a cemetery. The cellphone towers had fallen inside Haiti. But something had begun to flicker faintly inside of him and he called, anyway. Then he started phoning friends in Miami and Orlando. Maybe they had heard something. Maybe they had talked to somebody who had talked to somebody who had seen Lissa and the children before the buildings began to fall.
He kept moving around the church, as if fearful that the next person he stopped to talk to might deliver some fateful news. He wandered down hallways and walked into offices, not knowing why he was there. He paced outside in the nippy air. He left to buy more phone cards.
He returned home to his basement apartment Tuesday night. He looked at pictures of his children. He thought of their favorite hobbies: He saw Billy playing the piano. He saw Bella on her computer looking at maps. He saw Benedict beating the drums. He saw the twins swaying side by side singing gospel music, which they loved doing every Sunday in church. Then when he lay down -- "finally at 3 a.m." -- he saw awful visions of his family beneath rubble. He saw church funerals. He bolted upright. "I was thinking if they are truly dead, what will I do?"
He had to get work, but he couldn't go because he couldn't concentrate. So with his boss's support, he returned to his church. The death toll kept rising, but for Saint-Hilaire those epic numbers were reduced, in his mind's eye, to seven: He felt selfish for thinking so much about them. Other Haitians arrived at the church for counseling. They had family who were missing, too. "See the secretary," he said over and over.
And then he would walk down a hallway and flick open his cellphone. He'd dial Lissa's number. Maybe one of the children got away and was running someplace to get help. "I had to think of what might be a possibility," he says. But nothing. "Then I figured that if the older children, Billy, Bella and Bello survived, they would take care of the others. I figured yes, if they survived, my family could survive. Then I began to think: 'How am I going to get back into Haiti?' "
At home on Wednesday night, he stared at pictures of his children. His eyes were so very tired. "I wondered how come I couldn't hear God. That made me think my family is dead -- or dying."
That first night Lissa and her children walked and walked, not knowing where they were going, just trying to stay alive. They passed bands of people on their knees praying, as though inside an invisible church. Brick rubble was everywhere. Then night fell and it was as if a dark blanket had been draped over everyone.
CATASTROPHE IN HAITI: One man's agonizing wait
Lissa hugged her children. Some tough-looking youths were loitering in front of some crumbling houses, and for a little money they would dash in a house and steal something. It was risky and dangerous work, like playing Russian roulette with the brick walls. Lissa asked for a sheet. One sheet for a family of seven. Falling rock sounded like boulders, snapping them from sleep.
The next morning, they were surrounded by the acrid smell of dying. Lissa circled back to their family's collapsed home, lingering long enough inside to grab her bankbook: There was $20 in one account. She wished she had that $20 right now.
On Thursday, Lissa began to grow despondent. They found a little encampment. "Our belongings are few," she explained later. "We have our things in buckets and bags. There is no house in Haiti where we could go. We have no water to drink."
Famished and thirsty, the children wondered aloud whether their Papi was looking for them. Lissa was now worrying about the possibility of rain, of mud and mudslides and bricks falling on her children.
The flies that were buzzing seemed to grow larger by the minute. They were buzzing from dead body to dead body. From pool of blood to pool of blood. Then they began landing on the Saint-Hilaire children. Lissa fanned them away. The twins shrieked. Lissa spotted a woman holding a live rooster. Another woman plunged a knife into the rooster, killing it.
On Thursday morning, William heard from someone in Miami. "They told me that all of the houses in my neighborhood had fallen down." He didn't know what to believe. "There were a lot of rumors," he says.
Then he began thinking that people knew what had happened to his family and just didn't want to deliver the grim news. "You know how someone calls you and then don't really say anything? I thought they were calling because they knew I knew my family was dead but that I didn't want to talk about it."
He didn't know.
What he felt, he hated feeling: They could not survive something that had killed so many people. How would they stay connected to one another? At the same time, he hoped. He just knew that Billy, the oldest, would give his life to save any of the younger ones.
Members of the church began laying their hands on William, in little comforting motions throughout the day. He'd sit down and close his eyes for five minutes and suddenly wake up, imagining he had heard the voice of one of his children.
William was at the church late Friday when he heard a rumor from a relative in Orlando. Someone had seen one of his twins on the side of a road -- alone. He dismissed that because he knew one twin would never leave the other. "It had to be a rumor," he says.
Drained, unwashed and ill-clothed, the Saint-Hilaire family was now languishing under a blue tarp propped up with sticks, about three miles from their house in Port-au-Prince. The children worried that their mother had become delirious from drinking dirty water. She was complaining that she was feeling sick, that she might not make it. The family eventually found a prayer group and joined in. Then they scavenged for food, without much success. Early on Saturday morning, they walked past a house with four people visible in the living room. The roof started to fall in and Lissa tried to shield her children's eyes. The collapse looked lethal. The twins began to cry. They quickened their pace, to where they still did not know. Lissa hated that her children had to walk in cheap sandals.
They reached a small field and the children dozed off, their heads rolling about like plums. Death now had a ghostly glow: ashen bodies lying on the ground. Other bodies like twisted up mannequins. Men and women on foot moving brick, looking at a human face here, a human face there, then scurrying off, the clock of death ticking faster than their feet could move and their tired hands could lift another piece of brick.
The sky was churning as Lissa sat watch over her sleeping children.
William was in his living room on Saturday morning when his niece, Nephtali Saint-Hilaire, called from Orlando. "She told me she talked to someone in Port-au-Prince who saw my family and that they are alive. Still, I said, 'I can't trust this rumor! How can you be sure?' Then we lost phone contact."
Then an hour or so later, Rosemary Mesidor, a friend in Florida, called. She told him that his family was alive.
"How do you know?" he snapped.
She told him she had tracked someone down who recognized Lissa and could arrange a phone call.
William was standing when his cellphone rang.
It was Rosemary.
"Hold on for me, William," she screamed. "Just hold on."
And then the voice of the woman he had married at a small church in Port-au-Prince in 1992 and had given birth to their six children came on the line.
"William," she said, "me and the children are alive."
"Thank God!" he said. "Thank God!" He started pacing rapidly. He kept talking over his wife. Later, he would regret not hearing everything.
Lissa told him they have no food or water. She told him their house is ruined and she has no money.
She told him she loved him.
He told her he loved her.
During the days that followed, William Saint-Hilaire would go from being grateful that his family had miraculously survived the earthquake, to fearful that they will now die of hunger. In a second, brief phone call before the line went dead, Lissa would tell him that the children are growing steadily weaker. His 8-year-old daughter Belline would say "Daddy, the ground won't stop shaking." But on Saturday after saying goodbye to his wife, Saint-Hilaire listened to the voice of his 15-year-old daughter Bella on the phone.
"Papi," she asked, "how are you?"
And when his oldest daughter -- who had thus far endured unimaginable horror, who was now without food and water and had seen bodies heaped like stacks of laundry -- showed concern for her father and his well-being, Saint-Hilaire balled his hand up and put it in his mouth to stifle the sobs of relief.
Labbe-DeBose reported from Port-au-Prince. Haygood reported from Washington.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/20/AR2010012004852_5.html?sid=ST2010012004763
Thursday, January 21, 2010
At 5:30 on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 12, William Saint-Hilaire rose from his tiny Silver Spring basement apartment to get ready for work. By 2 o'clock, he had finished at his job installing sprinkler systems for a company in Bethesda and returned home for a bite. A short while later, he left for a 4:45 appointment at Montgomery County Community College to meet with an academic counselor about an English course he hoped to take.
"I was sitting there," he recalls, "talking to the counselor, and my cellphone started going off." He had the phone on vibrate. He did not want to be rude by answering it, so he let it go.
In the hallway after the meeting, Saint-Hilaire finally pulled the cellphone from his pocket. "It was a member from my church. She said, 'There's been an earthquake in Haiti! In Port-au-Prince!' " Saint-Hilaire ran to his car and raced toward his church in Adelphi. He pulled up in the parking lot of Eglise Baptiste du Calvaire where he is an assistant pastor, and rushed inside. On the television in a church office he saw images of destruction, of the dead and barely alive. The people around him seemed to suddenly recede from his line of vision. Within moments, an eerie calm settled inside him.
His wife and six children lived in a small house in Petionville in Port-au-Prince, where the 7.0 earthquake had struck. And so Saint-Hilaire knew what he knew: "My family is dead," he uttered to himself. "They are no more."
Lissa, his wife, and their children, Billy, 16, Bella, 15, Bello, 14, Benedict, 13, and the lovely and rambunctious 8-year-old twins, Belline and Bellinda. Gone. As if clipped from all the picture frames inside his basement apartment. "They could not survive that."
And with this belief overtaking him, Saint-Hilaire shuddered and his eyes went blank as he seemed to rise up and away from his own limp body. Weightless. "I could no longer tell if I was on the ground -- or in the air."
Dinnertime was nearing and Lissa Saint-Hilaire was in the family's house preparing a meal for the children and a couple of neighbors. She had just finished cooking. Bella was upstairs with her and the others were in the basement, playing their musical instruments.
Then, she recalls: "I felt the earth move."
A rumble, and booming sounds. It was as if a giant bulldozer had come to life beneath the ground.
Her screaming seemed to be in the air before it left her throat. She heard her children's footsteps.
"Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!"
Six sets of terrified eyes. Books and food tumbled from shelves. Pictures, ceramic figures, candles clattered to the floor. Windows shattered. Sounds unlike any they'd ever heard: horror's soundtrack.
They ran to the roof. They could see buildings collapsing and slabs of brick falling. They rushed back downstairs. As if frozen, they crouched together in the living room. They began to pray, hoping God would hear. But with more booming, God's ears seemed a mighty long way away. "The blood of Jesus! The blood of Jesus!" one of the dinner guests cried out.
Lissa had to protect her children.
"Mommy! Mommy!"
Wind coming through the windows blew things about. Like baby sheep, the children scooted close to their mother. They thought the house might cave in. They threw shoes, a Bible, birth certificates, passports into a green pillowcase. They ran out, turned up an alley, roped together by their own sets of hands. Brick walls were falling. The earth had stopped moving, but things above it had not. They hurried aimlessly down another street.
"Mommy!"
It was Belline; then Bellinda; then Bello. Everyone screaming "Mommy!"
Out of breath, they stopped. And they saw it: Death, dying, howling. Little limbs as still as store dollbabies. Longer legs protruding from buildings and twisting like worms in mud.
The kids shuddered.
The falling ash was blinding them. The blind leading the blind.
Bella looked at Benedict who looked at Billy. Lissa counted her six children. One by one, ending with her inseparable twins. And, with dead bodies lying all around her, she knew what she knew: They were among the undead.
Theirs was a classical Haitian love story tinged with the intrigue and danger that have haunted the island nation for decades.
William Saint-Hilaire first met Lissa Jacquet in 1987 at church in Haiti. He was teaching junior high school math and some English. They were married five years later. Lissa liked that William was "a man of God," who also was doing some church ministry. They purchased a house -- No. 3 on Perdrix -- in Petionville. It had two floors and two bedrooms. They were able to make some additions over the years, supplemented by money Lissa earned as a hotel maid.
In 2001, backed by the United States government, former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was returned to power in Haiti. His reign was fraught with controversy and accusations by human rights activists of skullduggery and thuggishness.
In time, William found himself speaking against the Aristide government in class. He was warned to stop. Authorities summoned him for questioning more than once. Then came the day in early 2002 when a fellow teacher, also outspoken, disappeared. In early 2003 Lissa, who had become increasingly worried about her husband's political stance, told him he should leave Haiti or risk not living to see his children grow up. At the airport, the children howled as Papi disappeared into the skies.
He settled first in Brooklyn, where he met a Haitian exile group, which helped him get to Silver Spring. He began working and sending money home to his family. He never let more than two days go by without calling home, and the voices of his wife and six children filled him with joy. For the past year, he has been working with an immigration lawyer to get visas so his family can come join him.
When Saint-Hilaire, 46, regained his equilibrium at the church on Jan. 12 in the hours after the earthquake, he started phoning his wife's number. It was as if the calls were landing inside of a cemetery. The cellphone towers had fallen inside Haiti. But something had begun to flicker faintly inside of him and he called, anyway. Then he started phoning friends in Miami and Orlando. Maybe they had heard something. Maybe they had talked to somebody who had talked to somebody who had seen Lissa and the children before the buildings began to fall.
He kept moving around the church, as if fearful that the next person he stopped to talk to might deliver some fateful news. He wandered down hallways and walked into offices, not knowing why he was there. He paced outside in the nippy air. He left to buy more phone cards.
He returned home to his basement apartment Tuesday night. He looked at pictures of his children. He thought of their favorite hobbies: He saw Billy playing the piano. He saw Bella on her computer looking at maps. He saw Benedict beating the drums. He saw the twins swaying side by side singing gospel music, which they loved doing every Sunday in church. Then when he lay down -- "finally at 3 a.m." -- he saw awful visions of his family beneath rubble. He saw church funerals. He bolted upright. "I was thinking if they are truly dead, what will I do?"
He had to get work, but he couldn't go because he couldn't concentrate. So with his boss's support, he returned to his church. The death toll kept rising, but for Saint-Hilaire those epic numbers were reduced, in his mind's eye, to seven: He felt selfish for thinking so much about them. Other Haitians arrived at the church for counseling. They had family who were missing, too. "See the secretary," he said over and over.
And then he would walk down a hallway and flick open his cellphone. He'd dial Lissa's number. Maybe one of the children got away and was running someplace to get help. "I had to think of what might be a possibility," he says. But nothing. "Then I figured that if the older children, Billy, Bella and Bello survived, they would take care of the others. I figured yes, if they survived, my family could survive. Then I began to think: 'How am I going to get back into Haiti?' "
At home on Wednesday night, he stared at pictures of his children. His eyes were so very tired. "I wondered how come I couldn't hear God. That made me think my family is dead -- or dying."
That first night Lissa and her children walked and walked, not knowing where they were going, just trying to stay alive. They passed bands of people on their knees praying, as though inside an invisible church. Brick rubble was everywhere. Then night fell and it was as if a dark blanket had been draped over everyone.
CATASTROPHE IN HAITI: One man's agonizing wait
Lissa hugged her children. Some tough-looking youths were loitering in front of some crumbling houses, and for a little money they would dash in a house and steal something. It was risky and dangerous work, like playing Russian roulette with the brick walls. Lissa asked for a sheet. One sheet for a family of seven. Falling rock sounded like boulders, snapping them from sleep.
The next morning, they were surrounded by the acrid smell of dying. Lissa circled back to their family's collapsed home, lingering long enough inside to grab her bankbook: There was $20 in one account. She wished she had that $20 right now.
On Thursday, Lissa began to grow despondent. They found a little encampment. "Our belongings are few," she explained later. "We have our things in buckets and bags. There is no house in Haiti where we could go. We have no water to drink."
Famished and thirsty, the children wondered aloud whether their Papi was looking for them. Lissa was now worrying about the possibility of rain, of mud and mudslides and bricks falling on her children.
The flies that were buzzing seemed to grow larger by the minute. They were buzzing from dead body to dead body. From pool of blood to pool of blood. Then they began landing on the Saint-Hilaire children. Lissa fanned them away. The twins shrieked. Lissa spotted a woman holding a live rooster. Another woman plunged a knife into the rooster, killing it.
On Thursday morning, William heard from someone in Miami. "They told me that all of the houses in my neighborhood had fallen down." He didn't know what to believe. "There were a lot of rumors," he says.
Then he began thinking that people knew what had happened to his family and just didn't want to deliver the grim news. "You know how someone calls you and then don't really say anything? I thought they were calling because they knew I knew my family was dead but that I didn't want to talk about it."
He didn't know.
What he felt, he hated feeling: They could not survive something that had killed so many people. How would they stay connected to one another? At the same time, he hoped. He just knew that Billy, the oldest, would give his life to save any of the younger ones.
Members of the church began laying their hands on William, in little comforting motions throughout the day. He'd sit down and close his eyes for five minutes and suddenly wake up, imagining he had heard the voice of one of his children.
William was at the church late Friday when he heard a rumor from a relative in Orlando. Someone had seen one of his twins on the side of a road -- alone. He dismissed that because he knew one twin would never leave the other. "It had to be a rumor," he says.
Drained, unwashed and ill-clothed, the Saint-Hilaire family was now languishing under a blue tarp propped up with sticks, about three miles from their house in Port-au-Prince. The children worried that their mother had become delirious from drinking dirty water. She was complaining that she was feeling sick, that she might not make it. The family eventually found a prayer group and joined in. Then they scavenged for food, without much success. Early on Saturday morning, they walked past a house with four people visible in the living room. The roof started to fall in and Lissa tried to shield her children's eyes. The collapse looked lethal. The twins began to cry. They quickened their pace, to where they still did not know. Lissa hated that her children had to walk in cheap sandals.
They reached a small field and the children dozed off, their heads rolling about like plums. Death now had a ghostly glow: ashen bodies lying on the ground. Other bodies like twisted up mannequins. Men and women on foot moving brick, looking at a human face here, a human face there, then scurrying off, the clock of death ticking faster than their feet could move and their tired hands could lift another piece of brick.
The sky was churning as Lissa sat watch over her sleeping children.
William was in his living room on Saturday morning when his niece, Nephtali Saint-Hilaire, called from Orlando. "She told me she talked to someone in Port-au-Prince who saw my family and that they are alive. Still, I said, 'I can't trust this rumor! How can you be sure?' Then we lost phone contact."
Then an hour or so later, Rosemary Mesidor, a friend in Florida, called. She told him that his family was alive.
"How do you know?" he snapped.
She told him she had tracked someone down who recognized Lissa and could arrange a phone call.
William was standing when his cellphone rang.
It was Rosemary.
"Hold on for me, William," she screamed. "Just hold on."
And then the voice of the woman he had married at a small church in Port-au-Prince in 1992 and had given birth to their six children came on the line.
"William," she said, "me and the children are alive."
"Thank God!" he said. "Thank God!" He started pacing rapidly. He kept talking over his wife. Later, he would regret not hearing everything.
Lissa told him they have no food or water. She told him their house is ruined and she has no money.
She told him she loved him.
He told her he loved her.
During the days that followed, William Saint-Hilaire would go from being grateful that his family had miraculously survived the earthquake, to fearful that they will now die of hunger. In a second, brief phone call before the line went dead, Lissa would tell him that the children are growing steadily weaker. His 8-year-old daughter Belline would say "Daddy, the ground won't stop shaking." But on Saturday after saying goodbye to his wife, Saint-Hilaire listened to the voice of his 15-year-old daughter Bella on the phone.
"Papi," she asked, "how are you?"
And when his oldest daughter -- who had thus far endured unimaginable horror, who was now without food and water and had seen bodies heaped like stacks of laundry -- showed concern for her father and his well-being, Saint-Hilaire balled his hand up and put it in his mouth to stifle the sobs of relief.
Labbe-DeBose reported from Port-au-Prince. Haygood reported from Washington.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/20/AR2010012004852_5.html?sid=ST2010012004763
mardi 12 octobre 2010
Dog that saved lives in Haiti gets national honor
The Associated Press
Monday, October 11, 2010; 6:17 PM
LOS ANGELES -- A once-abandoned dog that helped save lives after the Haiti earthquake and a three-legged cat that inspired a series of children's books have received national honors.
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals announced its dog and cat of the year awards Monday. Both are one-time California castoffs.
Pearl, a 4-year-old Labrador retriever, was abandoned at a shelter, then trained and sent this year to Haiti with a rescue team from the Los Angeles County Fire Department. The county's seven rescue teams helped bring 12 people to safety.
Cat honors went to Henry, a stray, injured kitten found near San Diego in 2004. After his leg was amputated, he inspired the children's books that have generated more than $50,000 for animal causes.
Monday, October 11, 2010; 6:17 PM
LOS ANGELES -- A once-abandoned dog that helped save lives after the Haiti earthquake and a three-legged cat that inspired a series of children's books have received national honors.
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals announced its dog and cat of the year awards Monday. Both are one-time California castoffs.
Pearl, a 4-year-old Labrador retriever, was abandoned at a shelter, then trained and sent this year to Haiti with a rescue team from the Los Angeles County Fire Department. The county's seven rescue teams helped bring 12 people to safety.
Cat honors went to Henry, a stray, injured kitten found near San Diego in 2004. After his leg was amputated, he inspired the children's books that have generated more than $50,000 for animal causes.
mercredi 8 septembre 2010
Haiti quake survivor returns home after 6 months
BY LINDSEY TANNER AP MEDICAL WRITER
Half-buried in rubble, Bazelais Suy struggled to breathe - a dead woman lay on his chest. He knew he had to get her off, fast. Because he could still move his arms, he somehow managed to remove his belt, loop it around the woman's own belt and drag her off. But his legs were still pinned.
In the ruins of a flattened, five-story university building, he was surrounded by survivors and corpses - students crushed in Haiti's catastrophic earthquake.
Suy, leader of an activist group working to help Haiti's youth lift their homeland out of poverty, was climbing the stairs to a fifth-floor classroom when the building at the University of Port-Au-Prince began to shake. In seconds, the structure collapsed, and the 28-year-old Suy tumbled four floors below.
---
EDITOR'S NOTE - With the aid of American supporters, a young man rescued from the rubble of Haiti's earthquake struggled to walk again - and to help his nation rebuild. An Associated Press reporter witnessed his long recovery and accompanied him on his return home.
---
He landed flat on his back on the ground, half-buried in broken concrete. The impact crushed his spine.
Suy lay dazed on his back in a small, dark hole. For hours, he heard the cries of people who had been buried alive, and he feared an aftershock would silence them all.
"I thought, 'I don't want to die,'" he said. "I told them not to be scared."
Suy did not die. Instead, he embarked on a nearly 2,000-mile journey that would restore his health and allow him to return, a half-year later, to the ground that almost killed him.
Suy's odyssey reads like a cliched Hollywood movie, but it's a real-life drama, starring a serious and charismatic young Haitian who owes his life to strangers from Chicago, now friends. They transported him to another world for six months of intense treatment, free of charge, while his country, too, tried to heal.
Suy was given little chance of ever walking again, but Haiti without legs is unimaginable - the able-bodied have a hard enough time getting by. Disability there is a stigma, a source of shame.
Stubborn and determined, Suy set his mind to beating the odds.
---
In the dark, Suy (Soo-'EE) drifted in and out of consciousness. He does not remember being pulled out and placed among bodies on the sidewalk.
Friends arrived and lifted Suy into a car, heading down bumpy streets, first to a public plaza several miles away where victims were being taken. His family found him there on the ground and took him to a hospital where conditions were filthy and the only treatment consisted of occasional painkillers. Eventually he was moved to a tent clinic outside Sacre Coeur Hospital in Port-au-Prince.
A doctor from an aid group asked Dr. Dan Ivankovich, a spinal specialist from Chicago, to check on Suy.
Ivankovich was incredulous. Under normal circumstances, patients with spinal-cord injuries would be immediately strapped to a backboard to immobilize the spine and avoid additional nerve damage. Most would then go straight to surgery.
Suy's rescuers had no choice but to move him, probably making the injury worse, Ivankovich said.
And 10 days had passed since the quake.
"I said, 'Are you out of your mind?'" Ivankovich recalled.
Ivankovich, an irreverent, 7-foot-tall surgeon used to treating poor patients from the inner city, had just arrived in Haiti with a medical team. Like his idol, Johnny Cash, the doctor wears black - from his leather cowboy hat and boots to gaudy onyx rings and black diamond ear studs.
It's an honor, he says, to help the downtrodden. And he shares that passion with his young patient.
Suy was born poor in southern Haiti and sent as a boy to live with an aunt in Port-au-Prince and attend school. He was one of the lucky ones. More than half the population lived in poverty even before the quake left more than 1 million homeless. About 40 percent of Haitian adults are illiterate, and almost half of Haitian children don't attend school.
Deeply religious, Suy loves his country but hates its poverty. A few years ago, he formed an advocacy group named GRRANOH, a French acronym meaning roughly "group for ideas, research and action for redirecting Haiti." Its volunteers have tutored orphans, fed the homeless, visited hospital patients and raised awareness about Haiti's needs.
"He doesn't have much but with the little he has, he wants to help people," said his girlfriend, Jeanna Volcy.
In the chaos of post-quake Haiti, Ivankovich was equipped to handle amputations and fractures, not spinal cord injuries. Nor was the damaged hospital in any position to host spinal surgery. Suy, meanwhile, had pressure sores on his back from lying prone for more than a week, and the risk of infection was grave.
When Ivankovich mentioned he would be going back to Chicago, the frightened young man pleaded with him.
"Take me with you," he cried, in halting English.
The doctor in black could not turn away. Ivankovich worked with U.S. authorities to help secure a humanitarian visa. Sixteen days after the quake, he flew to Chicago in an air ambulance. It was Suy's first trip out of Haiti.
---
In a three-hour operation, surgeons at Northwestern Memorial Hospital stabilized Suy's broken bones with titanium rods and screws. Their aim was to remove pressure on the spinal cord and prevent additional nerve damage, while allowing the surrounding bones to heal.
Afterward, Suy was still unable to move his legs. He had little sensation below his waist, except for patchy feeling in his thighs.
Ivankovich told him: "My friend, you're paralyzed. You're going to be in a wheelchair and this is just what you need to accept."
Suy had other ideas.
He was moved to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, one of the nation's best-known hospitals for brain and spinal cord injuries. Humanitarian funds at Northwestern and the hospital paid for the treatment, which would normally have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The 18-story center stands in Chicago's glittery Gold Coast neighborhood, lined with swank shops, posh hotels and gleaming skyscrapers. Suy, who was used to tropical heat, arrived in the dead of Chicago's bitter-cold winter. The buildings were gigantic, the language strange, his broken body seemed foreign - it all felt like another universe.
"He looked like he had seen a ghost. He seemed pretty shell-shocked," recalls Kate Silverman, a French-speaking rehab therapist who worked with him.
Suy was haunted by terrifying flashbacks from the earthquake. He wouldn't eat strange-tasting American food, and couldn't sleep because the U.S-sized hospital room seemed huge. A room that big in Haiti would house at least five people.
But Suy listened when Silverman said he needed to eat to get strong. And gradually, he did.
Rehab therapists doted on the handsome foreign student and put him through months of rigorous, painful workouts to rebuild his body. His daily routine became several hours of physical therapy - leg lifts from his wheelchair, tossing a big rubber ball, scooting down parallel bars on his arms. The hope was that some neurological function would return.
"It's OK if it's hard," a therapist told him.
"It's not hard," Suy insisted.
One day in March during a visit from Ivankovich, Suy lifted a leg up off his bed. The doctor was stunned.
"It was miraculous. It was the kind of recovery that we couldn't even have fantasized about," Ivankovich said.
Suy was soon ready to try using a walker. His thighs had regained more feeling and become strong enough to help support his weight. But lifting his feet to step forward required concentration. Even moving awkwardly down the 100-foot hospital corridor was a struggle. The plastic braces on his ankles hurt.
"When I see myself right now, and I think about how I used to be, I cry sometimes," he confessed.
Even when his therapy sessions ended, Suy worked out alone in his room, doing leg lifts to speed the healing. "You should never be discouraged in life," he said. "I know the day will come when I can do what I want."
---
As spring arrived, Suy went outside in a wheelchair.
Port-au-Prince's narrow sidewalks are covered with merchants' wares - piles of T-shirts, shoes, pots and pans, and blue jeans - and now, rubble. It's an impossible obstacle course for someone in a wheelchair. Suy's dark eyes shone as he talked about the broad American sidewalks, imagining building them in Haiti someday.
He lit up, too, whenever Ivankovich visited. "My angel," Suy called him.
"Angels don't come this big and don't wear black," Ivankovich joked.
Knowing the street conditions in Haiti, Suy's therapists created an obstacle course in the corridor, with rubber bumpers on the floor to simulate earthquake rubble. Suy struggled to lift the walker and his wobbly legs over the humps. But he wanted to try, again and again.
By April, he circled the entire seventh floor, even though his steps were unsteady and sweat dripped down his nose.
All the while, Suy spoke by phone or a donated computer with family and friends, but he did not always ask about Haiti. He feared the answers.
By May, Suy was ready for another test. He used to cook for his family, so he asked to make Haitian rice in the hospital kitchen, which is set up to help disabled patients relearn usual skills.
A walk to a grocery store less than two blocks away took almost half an hour, as Suy slowly maneuvered his walker over sidewalks and curbs. But he seemed happy to be out in the fresh air. Lake Michigan glistened in the distance, and a construction worker yelled, "Good work. Keep it up!"
Silverman fretted about the ethics of returning disabled patients to an ailing country. It was a topic of debate among the doctors and therapists.
"We wouldn't send somebody home to live in the street" if they couldn't live independently, Silverman said.
---
By June, Suy could walk with crutches or two canes - haltingly, and not very far, but he had surpassed anyone's expectations.
"It would not have surprised me if he did not walk at all," said Dr. John Liu, the Chicago surgeon who operated on Suy. "The fact that he's actually doing this well ... is fantastic."
After a month at a transitional Chicago rehab center, Suy was ready to return home.
Rosite Merentie, a Haitian-born hospice nurse in Chicago who flew with Ivankovich to Haiti after the quake, was moved to tears by Suy's progress. "This one patient I know I helped," she said.
"I saw so many in Haiti who were injured - head trauma, leg and spine injuries, burns, infections, wounds, dead bodies, pieces of bodies," she said. Seeing Suy "for me is just a joy, I cannot even explain."
She found Suy an apartment in Port-au-Prince, while Ivankovich looked into online college programs Suy could pursue back home. The doctor made plans for Suy to continue rehab at a newly built rehab clinic, one of the few signs of progress in Port-au-Prince.
Suy wanted to volunteer there, to give hope and encouragement to other disabled patients.
"He's not grandiose. He knows he's not going to save the country. But to hear him say, 'If I can maybe help one or two people,' it's just very refreshing to hear," said Dr. David Chen, who oversaw Suy's treatment at the rehab hospital.
Suy looked forward to going home. But he worried too - about finding a job, paying for his apartment, and the challenges of being a disabled young man in an even more disabled country.
Suy can expect additional improvement in his mobility for up to a year, Ivankovich said. Whether he'll ever walk unassisted is uncertain.
Merentie and Ivankovich joined Suy on his journey, bringing along eight suitcases brimming with donated clothes, medical supplies and laptop computers.
With a small American flag propped in the pocket of his sport shirt, and a red-and-blue Haitian flag design on his T-shirt underneath, Suy somberly peered out the window as the plane descended into Port-au-Prince. Crumbling houses and tent cities extended for miles below.
"It looks terrible. It's worse than I thought," he said.
At the airport, Suy was greeted by his brother and a cousin. He lived with them before the quake, but now their apartment is demolished. Now they live in tents, with no school and no jobs.
At Suy's request, the first stop after leaving the airport was his old university. The trip was a harrowing ride through streets lined with tent homes, broken buildings and pin-thin little boys begging for money.
At the site of the computer science building that could have been his tomb, much of the debris had been cleared away, but piles of rubble remained that kept Suy, with his walker, from strolling the grounds. He stopped near the gate and stared, memories of that awful day flooding back.
Surveying the ruins, he spotted a grim piece of debris: A human jawbone with several teeth missing.
A visit to his new apartment was a chance to think about the future. It's in a building owned by one of Merentie's relatives. Suy pronounced the spacious apartment perfect and thought living on the ground floor would be safe. But he also felt vulnerable, knowing he can't make a quick escape if another quake hits, or a fire, or some other disaster.
Children in school uniforms wandered into the building's courtyard, curious perhaps about the young man and the giant doctor in black. Suy quizzed them about their studies.
The youngsters were drawn to this kind stranger, listening intently as he told about being trapped in the quake. Suy told the children they have a duty: "Since you were saved, you have to save other kids."
The next day was Suy's 29th birthday, and Merentie organized a party at a hotel in the hills above Port-au-Prince. Suy's mother and siblings came, along with more than a dozen friends.
A young woman from Suy's advocacy group sang a hymn of praise, and Suy clasped his hands in prayer at the verse, "Say hallelujah."
Tears rolled down his cheeks as he looked around at his supporters.
"Suy has gone to hell and back, after being left for dead. This is my brother, but he's also my hero," Ivankovich said in a brief tribute. "I couldn't think of anywhere else that I would rather be tonight."
Suy took a swig of beer. "Thank you all very much," he said. And then he told of his hopes for his country's future, where shoeless children won't have to roam streets washing car windows to survive, and homes will replace tent cities.
"Youth is the hope of my country, is the hope of the world," he said.
Online:
Ivankovich's Website: http://www.bonesquad.com
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/07/v-fullstory/1811431/haiti-quake-survivor-returns-home.html#ixzz0yvws6Cc1
Half-buried in rubble, Bazelais Suy struggled to breathe - a dead woman lay on his chest. He knew he had to get her off, fast. Because he could still move his arms, he somehow managed to remove his belt, loop it around the woman's own belt and drag her off. But his legs were still pinned.
In the ruins of a flattened, five-story university building, he was surrounded by survivors and corpses - students crushed in Haiti's catastrophic earthquake.
Suy, leader of an activist group working to help Haiti's youth lift their homeland out of poverty, was climbing the stairs to a fifth-floor classroom when the building at the University of Port-Au-Prince began to shake. In seconds, the structure collapsed, and the 28-year-old Suy tumbled four floors below.
---
EDITOR'S NOTE - With the aid of American supporters, a young man rescued from the rubble of Haiti's earthquake struggled to walk again - and to help his nation rebuild. An Associated Press reporter witnessed his long recovery and accompanied him on his return home.
---
He landed flat on his back on the ground, half-buried in broken concrete. The impact crushed his spine.
Suy lay dazed on his back in a small, dark hole. For hours, he heard the cries of people who had been buried alive, and he feared an aftershock would silence them all.
"I thought, 'I don't want to die,'" he said. "I told them not to be scared."
Suy did not die. Instead, he embarked on a nearly 2,000-mile journey that would restore his health and allow him to return, a half-year later, to the ground that almost killed him.
Suy's odyssey reads like a cliched Hollywood movie, but it's a real-life drama, starring a serious and charismatic young Haitian who owes his life to strangers from Chicago, now friends. They transported him to another world for six months of intense treatment, free of charge, while his country, too, tried to heal.
Suy was given little chance of ever walking again, but Haiti without legs is unimaginable - the able-bodied have a hard enough time getting by. Disability there is a stigma, a source of shame.
Stubborn and determined, Suy set his mind to beating the odds.
---
In the dark, Suy (Soo-'EE) drifted in and out of consciousness. He does not remember being pulled out and placed among bodies on the sidewalk.
Friends arrived and lifted Suy into a car, heading down bumpy streets, first to a public plaza several miles away where victims were being taken. His family found him there on the ground and took him to a hospital where conditions were filthy and the only treatment consisted of occasional painkillers. Eventually he was moved to a tent clinic outside Sacre Coeur Hospital in Port-au-Prince.
A doctor from an aid group asked Dr. Dan Ivankovich, a spinal specialist from Chicago, to check on Suy.
Ivankovich was incredulous. Under normal circumstances, patients with spinal-cord injuries would be immediately strapped to a backboard to immobilize the spine and avoid additional nerve damage. Most would then go straight to surgery.
Suy's rescuers had no choice but to move him, probably making the injury worse, Ivankovich said.
And 10 days had passed since the quake.
"I said, 'Are you out of your mind?'" Ivankovich recalled.
Ivankovich, an irreverent, 7-foot-tall surgeon used to treating poor patients from the inner city, had just arrived in Haiti with a medical team. Like his idol, Johnny Cash, the doctor wears black - from his leather cowboy hat and boots to gaudy onyx rings and black diamond ear studs.
It's an honor, he says, to help the downtrodden. And he shares that passion with his young patient.
Suy was born poor in southern Haiti and sent as a boy to live with an aunt in Port-au-Prince and attend school. He was one of the lucky ones. More than half the population lived in poverty even before the quake left more than 1 million homeless. About 40 percent of Haitian adults are illiterate, and almost half of Haitian children don't attend school.
Deeply religious, Suy loves his country but hates its poverty. A few years ago, he formed an advocacy group named GRRANOH, a French acronym meaning roughly "group for ideas, research and action for redirecting Haiti." Its volunteers have tutored orphans, fed the homeless, visited hospital patients and raised awareness about Haiti's needs.
"He doesn't have much but with the little he has, he wants to help people," said his girlfriend, Jeanna Volcy.
In the chaos of post-quake Haiti, Ivankovich was equipped to handle amputations and fractures, not spinal cord injuries. Nor was the damaged hospital in any position to host spinal surgery. Suy, meanwhile, had pressure sores on his back from lying prone for more than a week, and the risk of infection was grave.
When Ivankovich mentioned he would be going back to Chicago, the frightened young man pleaded with him.
"Take me with you," he cried, in halting English.
The doctor in black could not turn away. Ivankovich worked with U.S. authorities to help secure a humanitarian visa. Sixteen days after the quake, he flew to Chicago in an air ambulance. It was Suy's first trip out of Haiti.
---
In a three-hour operation, surgeons at Northwestern Memorial Hospital stabilized Suy's broken bones with titanium rods and screws. Their aim was to remove pressure on the spinal cord and prevent additional nerve damage, while allowing the surrounding bones to heal.
Afterward, Suy was still unable to move his legs. He had little sensation below his waist, except for patchy feeling in his thighs.
Ivankovich told him: "My friend, you're paralyzed. You're going to be in a wheelchair and this is just what you need to accept."
Suy had other ideas.
He was moved to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, one of the nation's best-known hospitals for brain and spinal cord injuries. Humanitarian funds at Northwestern and the hospital paid for the treatment, which would normally have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The 18-story center stands in Chicago's glittery Gold Coast neighborhood, lined with swank shops, posh hotels and gleaming skyscrapers. Suy, who was used to tropical heat, arrived in the dead of Chicago's bitter-cold winter. The buildings were gigantic, the language strange, his broken body seemed foreign - it all felt like another universe.
"He looked like he had seen a ghost. He seemed pretty shell-shocked," recalls Kate Silverman, a French-speaking rehab therapist who worked with him.
Suy was haunted by terrifying flashbacks from the earthquake. He wouldn't eat strange-tasting American food, and couldn't sleep because the U.S-sized hospital room seemed huge. A room that big in Haiti would house at least five people.
But Suy listened when Silverman said he needed to eat to get strong. And gradually, he did.
Rehab therapists doted on the handsome foreign student and put him through months of rigorous, painful workouts to rebuild his body. His daily routine became several hours of physical therapy - leg lifts from his wheelchair, tossing a big rubber ball, scooting down parallel bars on his arms. The hope was that some neurological function would return.
"It's OK if it's hard," a therapist told him.
"It's not hard," Suy insisted.
One day in March during a visit from Ivankovich, Suy lifted a leg up off his bed. The doctor was stunned.
"It was miraculous. It was the kind of recovery that we couldn't even have fantasized about," Ivankovich said.
Suy was soon ready to try using a walker. His thighs had regained more feeling and become strong enough to help support his weight. But lifting his feet to step forward required concentration. Even moving awkwardly down the 100-foot hospital corridor was a struggle. The plastic braces on his ankles hurt.
"When I see myself right now, and I think about how I used to be, I cry sometimes," he confessed.
Even when his therapy sessions ended, Suy worked out alone in his room, doing leg lifts to speed the healing. "You should never be discouraged in life," he said. "I know the day will come when I can do what I want."
---
As spring arrived, Suy went outside in a wheelchair.
Port-au-Prince's narrow sidewalks are covered with merchants' wares - piles of T-shirts, shoes, pots and pans, and blue jeans - and now, rubble. It's an impossible obstacle course for someone in a wheelchair. Suy's dark eyes shone as he talked about the broad American sidewalks, imagining building them in Haiti someday.
He lit up, too, whenever Ivankovich visited. "My angel," Suy called him.
"Angels don't come this big and don't wear black," Ivankovich joked.
Knowing the street conditions in Haiti, Suy's therapists created an obstacle course in the corridor, with rubber bumpers on the floor to simulate earthquake rubble. Suy struggled to lift the walker and his wobbly legs over the humps. But he wanted to try, again and again.
By April, he circled the entire seventh floor, even though his steps were unsteady and sweat dripped down his nose.
All the while, Suy spoke by phone or a donated computer with family and friends, but he did not always ask about Haiti. He feared the answers.
By May, Suy was ready for another test. He used to cook for his family, so he asked to make Haitian rice in the hospital kitchen, which is set up to help disabled patients relearn usual skills.
A walk to a grocery store less than two blocks away took almost half an hour, as Suy slowly maneuvered his walker over sidewalks and curbs. But he seemed happy to be out in the fresh air. Lake Michigan glistened in the distance, and a construction worker yelled, "Good work. Keep it up!"
Silverman fretted about the ethics of returning disabled patients to an ailing country. It was a topic of debate among the doctors and therapists.
"We wouldn't send somebody home to live in the street" if they couldn't live independently, Silverman said.
---
By June, Suy could walk with crutches or two canes - haltingly, and not very far, but he had surpassed anyone's expectations.
"It would not have surprised me if he did not walk at all," said Dr. John Liu, the Chicago surgeon who operated on Suy. "The fact that he's actually doing this well ... is fantastic."
After a month at a transitional Chicago rehab center, Suy was ready to return home.
Rosite Merentie, a Haitian-born hospice nurse in Chicago who flew with Ivankovich to Haiti after the quake, was moved to tears by Suy's progress. "This one patient I know I helped," she said.
"I saw so many in Haiti who were injured - head trauma, leg and spine injuries, burns, infections, wounds, dead bodies, pieces of bodies," she said. Seeing Suy "for me is just a joy, I cannot even explain."
She found Suy an apartment in Port-au-Prince, while Ivankovich looked into online college programs Suy could pursue back home. The doctor made plans for Suy to continue rehab at a newly built rehab clinic, one of the few signs of progress in Port-au-Prince.
Suy wanted to volunteer there, to give hope and encouragement to other disabled patients.
"He's not grandiose. He knows he's not going to save the country. But to hear him say, 'If I can maybe help one or two people,' it's just very refreshing to hear," said Dr. David Chen, who oversaw Suy's treatment at the rehab hospital.
Suy looked forward to going home. But he worried too - about finding a job, paying for his apartment, and the challenges of being a disabled young man in an even more disabled country.
Suy can expect additional improvement in his mobility for up to a year, Ivankovich said. Whether he'll ever walk unassisted is uncertain.
Merentie and Ivankovich joined Suy on his journey, bringing along eight suitcases brimming with donated clothes, medical supplies and laptop computers.
With a small American flag propped in the pocket of his sport shirt, and a red-and-blue Haitian flag design on his T-shirt underneath, Suy somberly peered out the window as the plane descended into Port-au-Prince. Crumbling houses and tent cities extended for miles below.
"It looks terrible. It's worse than I thought," he said.
At the airport, Suy was greeted by his brother and a cousin. He lived with them before the quake, but now their apartment is demolished. Now they live in tents, with no school and no jobs.
At Suy's request, the first stop after leaving the airport was his old university. The trip was a harrowing ride through streets lined with tent homes, broken buildings and pin-thin little boys begging for money.
At the site of the computer science building that could have been his tomb, much of the debris had been cleared away, but piles of rubble remained that kept Suy, with his walker, from strolling the grounds. He stopped near the gate and stared, memories of that awful day flooding back.
Surveying the ruins, he spotted a grim piece of debris: A human jawbone with several teeth missing.
A visit to his new apartment was a chance to think about the future. It's in a building owned by one of Merentie's relatives. Suy pronounced the spacious apartment perfect and thought living on the ground floor would be safe. But he also felt vulnerable, knowing he can't make a quick escape if another quake hits, or a fire, or some other disaster.
Children in school uniforms wandered into the building's courtyard, curious perhaps about the young man and the giant doctor in black. Suy quizzed them about their studies.
The youngsters were drawn to this kind stranger, listening intently as he told about being trapped in the quake. Suy told the children they have a duty: "Since you were saved, you have to save other kids."
The next day was Suy's 29th birthday, and Merentie organized a party at a hotel in the hills above Port-au-Prince. Suy's mother and siblings came, along with more than a dozen friends.
A young woman from Suy's advocacy group sang a hymn of praise, and Suy clasped his hands in prayer at the verse, "Say hallelujah."
Tears rolled down his cheeks as he looked around at his supporters.
"Suy has gone to hell and back, after being left for dead. This is my brother, but he's also my hero," Ivankovich said in a brief tribute. "I couldn't think of anywhere else that I would rather be tonight."
Suy took a swig of beer. "Thank you all very much," he said. And then he told of his hopes for his country's future, where shoeless children won't have to roam streets washing car windows to survive, and homes will replace tent cities.
"Youth is the hope of my country, is the hope of the world," he said.
Online:
Ivankovich's Website: http://www.bonesquad.com
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/07/v-fullstory/1811431/haiti-quake-survivor-returns-home.html#ixzz0yvws6Cc1
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