Canadian nuns are safe - and determined to stay

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lperreaux@globeandmail.com

There is little time left for the living trapped in the wreckage of a city running on prayer, but the lost are not all doomed to become the dead. Those drafting the casualty list can strike at least three names from their grim tally of more than 1,100 Canadians missing.

The ruins of the churches, convents and religious schools on Christ Roy Street initially set tough odds for finding Toronto nun Mary Alban Bouchard. Her modest third-floor room in a convent is now a shattered ground-floor wreck. But a church worker pointed across the street yesterday, in the yard of another teetering church, where the tiny 79-year-old was celebrating mass. She was the lone white-haired and pale-skinned worshipper among about 100 Haitians. She was in a solid meeting room in another part of town when the quake struck.

Another Canadian, Sister Therèse Lagrange, from Quebec's Soeurs de Ste-Anne, was watching television on the second floor of the massive Maison Provinciale when the quake knocked plaster and a nun in training into her lap. The building stood, and she now sleeps in its yard with fellow Quebecker, Agathe Morin.

None of the women has been able to call home.

But the flashes of good news could not obscure the gloomy realty at several sites around Port-au-Prince, where searchers were contemplating the end of their rescue mission.

At the once-deluxe Montana Hotel, where former Canadian MP Serge Marcil was registered along with at least 10 other Canadians, crews celebrated one of the now-rare rescues yesterday as they saved one of the Haitian hotel owners.

The rescue took 12 hours as rotating teams of about a dozen men dug shafts through five layers of floor. The once-magnificent hilltop hotel, with its manicured grounds, hair salon and swimming pool, now resembles a smooth glacier, with the concrete roof wrapped around five floors of wreckage. As the rescue went on, surviving hotel workers built plywood coffins nearby.

In another part of town, Canadian dog-team searchers prepared to return to Canada yesterday after several bleak, fruitless days. Mark Pullen, a 55-year-old firefighter from Burnaby, B.C., led his German Shepherd mix, Zack, through every gap of a collapsed student residence. By late Saturday, his pooch hasn't found a single live body - only dozens and dozens of dead.

"I think the heat is hard on [the dogs]and I think the scent of death is something they understand," said Mr. Pullen, who volunteers with the Canadian Search and Disaster Dog Association. At the residence, Zack searched for Ensley Caliste, a 32-year-old engineer who was involved in renovations on the building. He was alive before the weekend, but by the time Zack found him, he was gone.

"If you could go back thinking you found at least one person, then it would all be worth it," Mr. Pullen said before running to the next site, still looking for that one.

Time was running out in other ways. At a Cuban-run clinic in the courtyard of a broken hospital, there were signs of the devastation of disease to come. Donovan Jean, a 1½-month-old baby boy, had diarrhea and was dehydrated. His skin was pasty and pale. While babies such as Donovan began to fail, the nuns who usually helped were struggling to survive themselves while providing food and water to the hundreds who sought their help.

Sister Lagrange's convent has a water reservoir and a guard armed with a shotgun at the front gate. She's been in Haiti 46 years, through hurricane, flood, insurrection and all manner of lawlessness.

"It's the worst I've ever seen, worse than the hurricanes by far. You don't have deaths like that. The roof goes flying, it doesn't fall on you," she said.

Sister Alban has spent 26 years in Haiti. Every night she sleeps on the ground, like Sister Therèse, with several hundred Haitians. She gets chills on the rocky, uneven ground and sometimes she sneaks into a cracked building to find warmth. "But I can't say I've suffered much. Just look around you," she says, pointing to the injured bodies in the school yard.

She insists she will pass on an evacuation flight, saying there is work to be done.

A member of the Sisters of St. Joseph, based in Toronto, Sister Alban works with poor women to start businesses and send their children to school.

"I've built 45 houses," she said, adding that ownership is the only way out of poverty for the women. Several of the houses were designed to be hurricane-proof. "I bet all the houses I built are now on the ground."

For now, all she can do is offer prayers of comfort to refugees. "Everything I need is still in that room," she says of her broken home. "If I can get to it, maybe I can get back to work."

Neither Sister Lagrange nor Sister Alban have any interest in going home, saying there's now even more work to be done. "If I wanted to go home, all I would have to do is put the word in with Mother Superior," Sister Therèse said. "But I'm still well. I won't die here. I'll die in Canada."