Witness - A timely snowcone before Haiti was turned upside down | Top News | Reuters
Joseph Guyler Delva, known to his colleagues as "Guy", is one of Haiti's most prominent journalists and heads the local SOS Journalist organisation that works to promote press freedom in the Caribbean nation. Guy, 43, been working for Reuters since 2004, covering everything from political turmoil to natural disasters. He has faced intimidation and death threats in the course of his reporting. His first dispatch on Haiti's Jan. 12 earthquake was one of the first detailed eyewitness accounts to the outside world reporting on the panic and scale of destruction in the streets of Port-au-Prince.
In the following story, Guy describes how his own home and office collapsed in the quake but his wife, Shirley, and children, Jennifer, 7 and Stephan, 1, survived.
By Joseph Guyler Delva
PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Call it fate, or the luck of the draw, but I'm convinced the thing Americans know as a snowcone or slurpy saved my life when the walls came tumbling down and my home city fell all the way into hell last week.
I had picked up my 7-year-old Jennifer from school and although I was running late because of heavy traffic I gave in when she asked me to stop to buy her one of those syrupy shaved ice treats known in Haiti as a "fresco" before heading back to my office in the Canape Vert district of Port-au-Prince.
Our stopover took longer than expected and the earthquake struck as I was still driving in the street, just a stone's throw away from the entrance to my office.
As dust clouds and panicked cries for help rose all around me, my wife Shirley somehow managed to get a call through to my cellphone. She had been working in my office, on the top floor of the three-story building, and said it was collapsing all around her.
I jumped out of the car and saw, for the first time, that the building had pancaked, its heavy concrete roof jutting out at awkward angles atop the rubble.
I appealed to stunned passers-by to lend me a hand as I called out Shirley's name repeatedly and started peering through the remains of the building to look for her. In what I can only describe as a miracle, I got another call from her about an hour later saying she had survived the fall with no injury and was now on the street outside our destroyed home, with Jennifer, our one-year-old son Stephan and a housekeeper. Continued...
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