Rescued choir girl regaining strength in Haiti

The 16-year-old choir girl who came close to dying but wouldn’t in the crumbled concrete graveyard of Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince astonished her doctors but not her mother with her miraculous survival.

More than two weeks after the earthquake brought down her school – and a day after she was lifted from the ruins – Darlene Etienne was eating yoghurt, talking and regaining her strength.

“We are very surprised at the fact that she is still alive,” said Dr Evelyne Lambert, who is caring for her on a French hospital ship offshore.

One who didn’t seem surprised was the girl’s mother, a poor rice-and-vegetable peddler.

“I never thought she was dead,” Kerline Dorcant, 39, said. “I always thought she was alive. It’s God” hearing a mother’s nonstop prayers, she said.

Added Darlene’s older brother, Preslin: “I think she has a special God.”

The astonishing rescue of the high school student, by a French search team that refused to go home when others did, offered a moment of joy in the grieving city, where uncounted thousands were entombed in a landscape of broken and heaped-up concrete, wood and metal.

They’re among an estimated 200,000 quake dead in Haiti, including 150,000 who Haitian officials say have been buried anonymously in mass graves.

The US Army’s bulldozers were digging into that rubble, knocking down shaky walls and beginning to clear away ruins in Port-au-Prince, where perhaps 90% of the buildings were destroyed or damaged in the January 12 quake.

Just a block away, looters armed with sledgehammers were smashing away at what was left of shops on Rue de Cesar, making off with everything from candy to perfume.

Darlene was pulled from the rubble of her cousin’s off-campus house near the ruins of the St Gerard school on Wednesday. She was rushed to a French field hospital and then to the hospital ship Siroco.

“At the very beginning, she was in very poor condition, but now she has been stabilised,” Dr Lambert said, saying Darlene was drinking water and had eaten yoghurt and mashed vegetables. She estimated her chance of survival at 90%.

“Darlene is a very strong lady,” her brother Preslin, 18, said, adding “and very smart at school”.

Darlene, the middle child of three, had left her family for the first time just nine days before the magnitude-7.0 earthquake, travelling the 40 miles from Marchant Dessalines, their hometown north of the capital, to live with her cousin and his wife while attending high school.

The quake trapped unknown numbers of students and staff in collapsed school buildings, hostels and nearby homes.

Among the victims was the wife of Darlene’s cousin, crushed by a falling wall in the back of their house. Making his way home from his office, the cousin saw the destruction and believed both were lost.

But on Wednesday – 15 days later – neighbours heard a voice weakly calling from the rubble and alerted authorities, who brought in the French rescue squad.