<p>This is Sonia Flury’s story, translated by Camala Jourdain, a Miami nurse working in Haiti under the auspices of the Haitian American Nurses Association.</p><p>My name is Sonia Flury, and I’m 40 years old, and I live in the Canape Verte section of Port-au-Prince with my 20-year-old daughter, Pascale Delmas.</p><p>It was about 4:30 p.m. and I was lying in bed with my daughter when we felt the house started to shake. We felt the house cave in and all the furniture fell down around us. We yelled “Help me, help me,” and then we heard cries from the people on the upper floors crying out for help, too. Three stories fell on top of us. Then we felt the roof fall in. The only thing that kept the roof from falling on top of us was that I have a dresser that has three tiers, and the dresser caught the roof.<br /> After everything fell on top of us, I was lying on the bed on my back and my daughter fell into a hole next to the bed, with only her head above the rubble. She was by my left shoulder, and I put my arm around her head and cradled it. Neither one of us could move; we were surrounded on all sides by concrete and crammed in by the concrete walls.</p><p>My daughter said, “I need to get out so I can drink. I’m thirsty.” She cried and started to panic. I consoled my daughter, and we started singing. We sang, “Keep me, keep me, God of love, give me a safe place to stay close to you. Let me find a place to hide behind you, and I know you will never leave me.” I told God, “If it is your will for me to die, send your angels to come get me and receive me into your kingdom, but if your will is for me to stay alive, keep me alive so I can testify to the miracles you’ve performed in my life.” I just sang and prayed to God to let me live so that I could live a spiritual life for him.</p><p>My daughter was thirsty, so I urinated and put it in my hand since I didn’t have a cup, and I gave it to my daughter to drink. God let me use my urine to appease her thirst. I didn’t eat or drink for five days, but still I urinated every day. I was never thirsty and never hungry. On the third day, my daughter became suicidal. I had a mirror above my bed, and it broke, so there were pieces of glass around us. My daughter grabbed the glass and tried to cut her neck and cut her belly and cut her side.</p><p>Then she cut her bra off and tried to use it to choke herself. I stopped her, and my daughter told me, “You are selfish. You see I’m suffering and you don’t want me to take myself out of my misery.” I told my daughter she couldn’t kill herself if God wanted her to be kept alive and stay here. My daughter stopped and asked God for forgiveness.</p><p>On the fourth day, I told my daughter, “Don’t worry, somebody will come for us.” That day, we heard voices, people talking outside saying they were coming to bring the corpses out. I said, “No I’m not dead, I’m alive!” I was screaming and screaming, and one of the people who came for the corpses heard me, but someone else in his group said it was too dangerous to break the walls to get me, so they left.</p><p>My daughter was saying, “God, what have you done? You sent us rescuers and they don’t want to help us.” And I responded to my daughter, “God will rescue us. Don’t worry – someone will come tomorrow.” My daughter confessed all her sins to God, and so did I. We slept that night, and in the morning, we heard noises in the top part of the house. It was residents coming back to look for their passports and papers that they’d left behind. My daughter started banging on the walls, and I said,
