Exact excerpt from my journal this day:

 

“One of our Haitian friends and interpreter is named Sammy. He is my age, 23, and grew up in the orphanage with his brother, the only family he knows. He and his brother were living in Port-Au-Prince at the time of the earthquake. He lived in what we would call an apartment style building. Basically, he and his brother paid a little bit of money to sleep in a room in a 3-story building.

 

 

While living there, in January, he had gotten a call on his cell phone (which is another story in itself: the fact that most Haitians will die of starvation before they get rid of their cell phone, even though most don’t even have electricity to charge the battery…). Since he didn’t have cell-service inside his concrete apartment building, he always had to step outside the front door to talk on the phone.

 

He was outside for less than 2 minutes when the earthquake struck. The building that he had just stepped out of, collapsed to the ground in a fraction of a second. Sammy was a 2-minute phone call away from being thrown into a mass-grave as another statistic among the 250,000. Insane.

 

 

He said that there were 3 children from another family still inside the building when it collapsed, along with his God-mother. They all died. His brother was safe, but 4 of his close friends all died.

 

After the quake, Sammy didn’t have any food for 3 whole days; he said he had to eat salt and drink dirty water. But, he was able to make his way out of Port-Au-Prince to a pastor he knew. The pastor gave him some food and a little money to buy clothes, since he lost everything but the shirt on his back during the quake.