Would-be rescuers work on the ruins of a school in Port-au-Prince in which as many as 200 people are believed trapped.Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
Covered in concrete dust and looking like a little ghost, the boy appears to be dead until his bright, five-year-old eyes break his powdery mask.
Rushed to an outdoor clinic run by Cuban doctors, the diagnosis is quick.
"He's fine, he's fine," says nurse Bila Guevera, shortly before giving the boy a shot of painkillers. He cries for the first time since he was found. In shock, he doesn't know that his family, including his father, a local police chief, is still stuck in the wreckage of their apartment building.
Three days after Haiti's catastrophe, with hope beginning to dwindle for trapped survivors, heavy equipment rumbled into several neighbourhoods yesterday. International rescue teams clawed through the wreckage as search efforts appeared to ramp up in a rudderless, quake-shattered city. While Haitian officials admit they are at a complete loss, local volunteers are being bolstered by growing ranks of rescuers from abroad.
Five-year-old Samäel was saved from his concrete tomb by a small team from a nearby town led by a gregarious local official who ignored the quick conclusion of Belgian experts that no one was alive beneath the ruins. Claire Lydie Parent, mayor of hard-hit Pétionville, is roaming Port-au-Prince with her locally trained crew looking for reachable survivors.
"We go where we can help," she says. "I don't care where it is."
Just a few feet down the block from Samäel's shattered apartment, Mexicans, Israelis and Haitians are attempting to dismantle what looks like a stack of pancakes. The seven storeys of the Saint-Gérard technical school have dropped in tight unison on about 200 students and instructors.
Anxious relatives are gathered around. One person has been pulled out alive, and it's believed two more remain.
Message Joseph has a son inside, but recent precedent gives him hope. His wife was also trapped beneath a collapsed school. She has a badly injured back, but is alive.
"You can't believe in God and not have hope," Mr. Joseph says. His words draw a snort from Benesh Exantus, whose husband, Macatus, is also wedged somewhere in the stacked concrete. "I don't think there's any chance," she says.
Haiti's schools and government buildings are among the most heavily damaged buildings in Port-au-Prince. Education Minister Joël Desrosiers Jean-Pierre says 90 per cent of the city's schools are down, and rescue has barely started.
He himself is busy trying to save ministry officials who are trapped beneath what's left of their headquarters.
"For the moment we are a small crisis committee, not a ministry. I'm driving people to the hospital and running for medicine," the minister says. "There is no real organization, no real rescue at the schools."
In front of a crushed downtown private academy, Dorimé Yvens, normally a janitor in a government building, pulls away in a pickup truck. He and a half-dozen men have removed a corpse from the middle of the street out front. It's barely after noon, and he's already scooped up 70 bodies and added them to the stack outside the morgue.
On the ground, bodies and wreckage are moving, but the Haitian government has been shattered into uselessness by the earthquake, and is now taking refuge on the periphery of Port-au-Prince.
A small police station near the airport has become the seat of national government, where cabinet ministers mill about hoping to recharge laptops and cellphones.
President Réné Préval has taken over the office where the chief of police usually sits. Mr. Préval and his ministers have just emerged from a cabinet meeting where they've made a list: Six government ministries have vanished, including Health, Public Works and Interior. The other 11 have been damaged beyond use.
"Not one government ministry is operational today. Not one," says Edwin Paraison, the minister in charge of Haitians abroad.
The ministers, who gossip with each other in the squat concrete building, have been reduced to digging their own staff members from beneath the ruins and rushing them to hospital.
They also have their own tales of horror to tell.
Tourism Minister Patrick Delatour has lost both parents and three injured grandsons are on their way to a U.S. hospital. His car was buried under rubble and he kicked his way through a windshield to get out.
"Everybody is in the same situation," Mr. Delatour says. "It's not so much a personal story as a nation that has been destroyed."
With a politician's penchant for emphasizing the positive, Mr. Delatour says the quake might improve Haiti's image. Streets are jammed every night with the homeless. Some bed down but, all through the night thousands of women's voices echo across the city in church song.
"How many cities have the ability to self-police in a situation like this?" Mr. Delatour says.
"I don't know how long it will last, or if it will last. But right now all there is is prayer and the organization of the street itself."
Les Perreaux