On Haiti
found
Two stories about searching.
First, from Theola Labbé-DeBose and Wil Haygood (thanks, Mark): At 5:30 on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 12, William Saint-Hilaire rose from his tiny Silver Spring basement apartment to get ready for work. By 2 o'clock, he had finished at his job installing sprinkler systems for a company in Bethesda and returned home for a bite. A short while later, he left for a 4:45 appointment at Montgomery County Community College to meet with an academic counselor about an English course he hoped to take.
"I was sitting there," he recalls, "talking to the counselor, and my cellphone started going off." He had the phone on vibrate. He did not want to be rude by answering it, so he let it go.
(Intersting stuff on how this story came together from the Post's Story Lab.)
The second is from Meg Laughlin: PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti
For nearly a week, the road to find Daniel Thelusmar's brother was blocked by a nation of people desperate for help.
He left Tampa three days after the earthquake. He left his job at Humana, left his Creole radio show, his college coursework, and his church congregation in north Tampa. He promised to call his wife and his three young children — if he could — and he got on a plane. Born in Haiti and fluent in six languages, Thelusmar, 31, knew he could help with the relief effort. What he didn't know was whether his older brother, Fenel, was alive or among the estimated 200,000 who had perished in the quake. But from the moment he landed at the airport in the Dominican Republic, finding Fenel seemed to fall farther down the list of things he had to do.
An American rescue worker needed help getting his search dog through customs. Thelusmar translated and then accompanied him all the way to Port-au-Prince. "I was thinking of all the people trapped in buildings and I had to help him," he said. Hospitals needed translators for foreign doctors. Food and water distributors begged for someone to guide them through a nearly unnavigable city. Three more days passed. Wednesday, his mother called him. Please, she implored, stop what you are doing. Go find Fenel.
Thursday morning Thelusmar climbed into the front seat of an SUV he procured for the day and asked the driver to take him to Matissant, the neighborhood where he grew up and where he hoped to find his brother still alive.