The Day the Earthquake Hit

What is it like to live through an earthquake? Shortly after the Haitian earthquake on January 12, 2010, I starting reading the blogs of Americans in Haiti in order to understand. I needed the blogs to be in English. As it so happens, many of the Americans and Canadians who live Haiti are missionaries working for charities there. The Livesays--pictured above--are one such American family.

Tara Livesay, formerly of Minnesota, is a mom of seven children who with her husband Troy has been working in Haiti for four years. The Livesays have a combination of biological kids and adopted Haitian children. To read Tara's fabulous blog--The Livesay Haiti Web-log, follow the link at the right side of this page.

Troy and Tara work for Heartline Ministries, the charity I am supporting with this house-building effort. For more than 20 years before the earthquake, Heartline Ministries has been working with women, children and orphans in Haiti in many different ways. One thing that Tara helps Heartline with is to act as a midwife assistant/cheerleader for Haitian women in the midst of childbirth at the Heartline birthing center.

During the earthquake, which hit a few minutes before 5 p.m. in Haiti, Tara and Troy were in their kitchen at their rented home in an area very close to Port-au-Prince. The children were scattered all over the house and in other buildings on the property. Things began to quake. Everything--pictures, dishes, clocks, the jars of spaghetti sauce they had on the counter top--began falling and smashing. Tara remembers, "For me personally, the sound of the earthquake is what struck me the very most. Yes, we were shaking and yes the entire house was rocking, so much that you easily fell down as you walked. But the sound was deafening and it is what first registered with me when I wondered WHO could possibly want to bomb Haiti?"

After about 40 seconds the quaking stopped. During the earthquake, they had been trying to find all the children to get out of the house, but there wasn't time to locate them all while the shaking was going on. Their house had withstood the earthquake without collapsing. Says Tara, "The kitchen floor was covered in soy sauce and spaghetti sauce and glass. Troy was pacing. He seemed uncertain of what to do first. Upstairs the desks had vibrated out of their places to the center of the office area. Books had shaken free from their spots on the shelves. The floor was covered with office supplies, papers, things from the walls, and glass. The boys' "pet" lizard used the opportunity of a broken pickle-jar to escape once and for all. The walls were bare of everything that hung on them just sixty seconds earlier. Water leaked from the toilet that had been shaken out of its place."

Troy and Tara got their children and some guests visiting from the USA outside the house to their driveway. Everybody in the family was unhurt, but the kids were terrified and shaking. Soon after, an aftershock hit, which sent all the children screaming and diving for the safety of their parents' laps.

Phones and electricity did not work, so the Livesay family had no immediate way to know the totality of the devastation in Haiti. They knew things were bad and guessed that things were much worse in other parts of the city.

Soon, Troy decided he needed to go check on people they knew in other places--especially other missionaries and children at several orphanages. It had gotten dark shortly after the earthquake, and power was out everywhere -- so he was going out into chaos in total blackness. Tara says letting Troy go out into the post-earthquake apocalypse was one of the hardest things she ever had to do. They knew it was dangerous to venture out into the unknown. Tara told Troy, "If I never see you again, I love you so much. But PLEASE come back."

Tara fed the children, and put them down to sleep -- only to worry and sleeplessly pray for Troy until the wee hours of the night.

Troy didn't come back until four a.m. He described collapsed buildings and blocked roads that forced him to abandon the truck and walk, in some cases crawling over rubble and dead bodies. All the places they knew, for example the place where the family normally grocery shopped, were in ruins. Says Tara, "He cried as he told me the story of a young woman and her husband's cousin sitting outside of the collapsed St. Josephs Boys home. Her husband was trapped inside. The husband had been singing for awhile, they could hear him, but eventually the singing stopped. Troy asked if he could give them a ride, they were not ready to leave or give up on saving their lost loved one."

So Tara and Troy slept only about half an hour that night, and woke up to face Haiti, post-earthquake. Tomorrow, more stories from the day the earthquake hit.