Tossing The Child Clear

Jon Lee Anderson reports on Haiti:

When the quake hit, Nadia had tried to run out of the ravine. She was halfway up the crude concrete steps that led to the street when she heard screaming from near her house. She ran back, and saw her neighbor lying dead under the pile of cinder blocks. The neighbor had a seven-month-old boy. “I said, ‘Where’s the baby, where’s the baby?’ and we saw him lying there on the ground.” She had managed to toss the child clear just as she was buried by the blocks. “A woman picked him up and gave him to me,” Nadia said. “He was covered with blood, and there was also blood on his socks. One arm looked dislocated, and one of his legs, too, and he had a swelling on his head. I was scared he would die in my hands. He kept trying to go to sleep, and I was trying to wake him up.” Nadia went looking for his relatives and found his aunt, who lived in Ravine 75, a few blocks away from Fidel.