The Day The Earthquake Hit, Part 2

Chris Rollings -- the man in this picture -- was having an ordinary day in Haiti with ordinary problems (for Haiti) until the earthquake struck. Chris and his wife Leslie run a charity called Clean Water for Haiti. Chris had just gotten a loaner vehicle from a Toyota dealership near Port-au-Prince when the loaner truck broke down in the center of the road. The Rollings are Canadians who have lived and worked in Haiti for years--Chris for seven years and Leslie for four years. The Rollings have a little two-year-old daughter, Olivia, who is adopted from Haiti. They also have their own family blog, called Rollings In Haiti.

Chris was not pleased that the truck he has in his possession for less than a half a day had conked out, but these things happen in Haiti. He stepped out of the broken truck and called the dealership. While he waited in the street for someone to come, the the earthquake hit. Says Chris, "As the quake rolled on, I remembered the conversations I’ve had with the other missionaries about what an earthquake would mean for Haiti...it would be devastating. Construction materials and methods aren’t just shoddy, they’re suicidal..."

I am going to quote directly from Chris's blog entry for that day, because the story he tells is very, very powerful.

"I didn’t actually fall on the ground, but I stumbled around quite a bit," says Chris. When the tremors ceased, a large dust cloud was rising from the building a few doors down. A 3 story school full of teenage girls had collapsed. I stood around looking stupid for longer than I’d like to admit. I looked at the truck from Toyota, tried to call my wife (the service was out) and looked around me at people’s reactions. Virtually everyone reacted in strange ways. Eventually, I went to the school and started working to pull trapped students from the wreckage."

"The work was very hard because I was working by myself... I got one girl out, who was very frantic. I told her to stop shouting and pray for help. She was about 10 feet deep under the collapsed cement roof of the building. At one point I went and borrowed a hammer from someone to break up the large piece of cement that she was trapped behind. The aftershocks scared the crap out of me, and I really didn’t like being under that cement slab. There was an obviously dead woman under the slab with us."

"When the girl was out, I took my hammer and moved over to find the next trapped girl. All I could see was her face and left arm, and she frantically called out to me. I asked her to calm down because it would help me to work and asked her to pray for both of us. She calmed down and became very brave. I was having trouble seeing her where she was jammed under the slab. I pulled out a very large piece of rubble that didn’t really help Jacqueline at all (her name was Jacqueline). There was some sort of object behind that rubble and when I went to move it it turned out to be another girl’s bottom. The girl cried out but I could barely hear her – her whole head was underneath rubble."

"At this point I began to realize that I was in over my head. All I had was a hammer, and it was quickly becoming pitch dark with twilight fading and no electricity anywhere. I tried to borrow a flashlight, but it was impossible. I had a moment of feeling intense helplessness. After thinking and praying for a minute, I told Jacqueline that I had to leave her and find more help."

"I walked 4 or 5 miles to a place where I could get a bus, then got on one eventually made it home just after 9pm. On my way home, I resolved to return to Port au Prince the next day with 2 trucks full of tools and workers to do whatever we could."

The Rollings' charity builds water filters, so Chris had some serious power tools at home, as well as the gasoline-powered generators needed to charge the power tools. At daybreak, Chris and many of the employees of Clean Water for Haiti headed back to the school where Chris had been the day before. Chris went right to the spot where he had been digging for Jacqueline. Sadly, both she and the girl next to her were dead.

Chris resumes telling the story. "Some of the local people had been working through the night to rescue their loved ones. They had found lighting and hack saws and had already pulled some people out, including a lot of bodies. We joined their efforts with our power tools. Quickly, we pulled out two more living girls and then a third. The fourth and fifth were a lot more work and each had a severely crushed foot. After that, there were no more cries for help, even when everybody went quiet in order to listen. Lots of dead bodies were still stuck, but getting at them would require large machines."

Chris' story leaves me speechless. In the days after the earthquake, Chris suffered a great deal of survivor's guilt about those girls. He knows he did everything he was physically able to do to save Jacqueline and her classmate, and it wasn't enough to prevent their deaths. He had no tools, no other workers, and no light to help him work in the dark. He had to go get tools and help. He also needed to go check on the status of his own wife and daughter, who he prayed were still alive. (They were--the Rollings home suffered only minor damage and Leslie and little Olivia were fine.) But with his efforts, Chris was able to save one girl at the school the first day and five more on the day after the quake. That means a lot.

Because Chris was stranded in the middle of the street when the earthquake hit, no buildings fell on top of him--that broken-down truck may have saved his life. Perhaps Chris was spared so he could then save those girls. Who knows? In a situation as incredible as what he describes, I think he did an amazing, admirable job. Thank you Chris, for doing the hard work of saving the lives of those young students and preparing others for their next lives with Jesus.

Coming soon to this blog: The Earthquake, Part 3. The days right after...