Tears continue to stream down my cheeks – I’ve been reading stories non-stop about this school collapse. My three little girls go to a school downtown. I keep imaging them just sitting there in their little class – talking to their friends – nice, ironed uniforms on – hair all in bows and ribbons…..then out of nowhere their concrete roof comes down? How in the world do you recover from that? I read about a lady still looking for her 3 children. I read about someone who lost their only son. I read about an entire class and teacher who were killed. I cannot imagine my little babies being buried alive under rubble or what their last moments were like. I can only imagine their little cries and how scared they all must be. PLEASE KEEP PRAYING.
Here is what I cut and pasted from a news article:
The death toll from a school collapse in a Haitian shanty-town rose to 82 after rescue workers uncovered a classroom with 20 dead students and their teacher, officials say.
A new floor had been under construction atop La Promesse school in Petion-ville, on the outskirts of the capital Port-au-Prince, when the building caved in on Friday morning during classes.
Neighbouring homes were destroyed as the three-storey building came crashing to the ground, leaving scores trapped beneath huge slabs of cement and twisted steel rods.
Frantic parents crowded the site as scores of people, their faces covered in grey dust, climbed over the debris to try to rescue those pinned underneath.
UN engineers and soldiers from the UN mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) worked to remove heavy pieces of concrete and to contain the large crowds of people.
Cries of distress could be heard around the site, from still-alive students and teachers beneath the rubble and from parents desperately searching for their children.
A deeply distressed Marie Flore said she had no news of any of her three children.
“It brought down the rest of the building while the students were in class,” said another panic-stricken woman who had hurried to the scene to look for her child.
The International Red Cross, the Haitian Red Cross, members of the UN Haiti peacekeeping force and other groups joined in the rescue.
By late Friday some 50 bodies, most of them children, had been found. But the toll kept rising.
“Rescue teams have worked all night and have retrieved from under the debris eight more bodies,” Nadia Lochard, a spokeswoman from the civil protection bureau told AFP on Saturday.
More children could still remained trapped beneath the rubble, Lochard said, adding that French fire crews from the island of Guadeloupe had arrived overnight to help in the rescue effort.
At the hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, medics worked around the clock to save the injured. Eight patients died during the night, but there were success stories.
“Two seven-year-old children – a boy and a girl – have been saved,” Lochard said. “One of them underwent a successful operation,” she said, without elaborating.
In Washington the US Agency for International Development (USAID) said search and rescue teams were on their way to the scene.
“This is a tragic situation, especially since children are involved. We are working alongside the Haitian government to provide immediate assistance in the rescue efforts,” USAID administrator Henrietta Fore said.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner expressed his “deep emotion” over the tragedy and promised to send “as soon as possible a civil security team to help the Haitian authorities in rescuing the victims who are still buried.”
