In this life, there are things you should be able to stand on. The earth under your feet. A mother's love. Hope that whatever else happens, tomorrow will come.
Fedia Cherisier grew up like that.
She spent most of her 17 years in a two-bedroom Port-au-Prince apartment with her parents and four younger siblings, poor in a place where nearly everyone is poor, but never afraid of the future.
Until 4:53:09 p.m. on Jan. 12.
The ground bucked, shuddered, and the sky turned white with dust. There were screams of agony and shrieks of fear – "Jesus! Save us, Jesus!"
Cherisier, a rail-thin woman with tight cornrows and uncertain eyes, collapsed under a tree with her brothers and sisters, holding tight. The quivering and crashing lasted an eternity – 45 seconds.
"The house was flat," Cherisier said later, explaining that her family lived in the bottom-floor apartment of a two-story building.
"We knew our parents were dead, so we just ran into the street."
About 1,800 miles away in Dallas, the earth began to shift under Esther Dureus-Reynolds, too.
The Haitian-American president of the Beth-Hanan Foundation, a nonprofit group, said she had been feeling the tug of her homeland in the weeks before the quake. Then her phone rang with an early report of the damage.
"From that day on, I couldn't sleep," she said. "I knew I had to be in Haiti."
Thus began two journeys.
Cherisier gathered her four orphaned siblings – ages 8 to 14 – in the rubble-strewn streets of Port-au-Prince. No food, water or money, and they started to walk.
In Dallas, a mother with horn-rimmed glasses and an indefatigable spirit, took the first steps toward her new children.
'Barefoot, no parents'
Grotesque corpses jutted from the twisted metal and car-sized chunks of concrete. Debris clogged roads. People seemed to be running everywhere.
"I felt out of my element, out of my skin," Cherisier said. "We were barefoot, no parents."
None of the children was injured in the quake, but they all were sobbing. They walked without direction, swallowed by the chaos. Nightfall soon descended.
In some ways, Cherisier said her family lived the typical, threadbare life of most Haitians.
Her stepfather, Hodoole Jean, walked and caught rides into the countryside, where he purchased vegetables and cooking supplies. Her mother, Famita Frederic, sold them in the market – making enough money to buy textbooks, uniforms and supplies for the five children to go to private school.
About 85 percent of schools in Haiti charge to educate students – in some cases, only a few dollars a week – but an amount still unattainable for families that average $500 a year.
Cherisier said her parents insisted their children attend school, church and stay out of the streets.
Her stepfather would not allow her to have a boyfriend, and her mother enforced a "straight home from school" edict. Once there, the children were only allowed to play in the front yard with the gate closed.
Their life was austere – the four sisters shared a small bedroom, and their brother bedded down on the couch – but everyone had clothes and enough to eat.
The family owned a small television, Cherisier said, but it went out the day before the earthquake.
That quirk of fate saved the children's lives.
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