Almost one in a million

Meet Widlove Gedeon.


Before the earthquake, Widlove was a healthy 12 year old boy who loved school and soccer and his mom. But when the earthquake happened, he was in his first floor classroom when the three story building collapsed on him. His mother went to the school within an hour after the earthquake and could hear her son inside the rubble, but couldn't get to him. Meanwhile, Widlove lay in the dark, his head crushed under a concrete column, and his left arm pinned under blocks and touching a live wire. Widlove says he only felt it shock him once - he probably was shocked continually throughout the night, but that first shock effectively killed all the nerves in his hand.


At five in the morning, the day after the earthquake, Widlove's mother returned with help. It took them 6 hours to dig Widlove out. "He looked horrible," she told me. "I could lift the flesh of his face all the way up and off his skull. And I didn't know where to go with him!" She eventually took him to Gonaives, an unaffected city 3 hours from Port-au-Prince, where he received some basic care on Thursday. I wonder honestly how he survived that long! From Gonaives, his brave mother took him across the border to the Dominican Republic. He spent 2 months inpatient at a hospital, receiving skin grafts to three places on his face and forehead as well as surgery to try to correct the contracture in his wrist. But they couldn't do anything for his eye.


Back in Port-au-Prince, Widlove's mother has not returned to work. Instead, she has been searching everything, in every hospital, clinic, and NGO for someone who can help her son's eye. Eventually, someone referred her to Angel Missions. And that's how I came to spend my morning in the company of this miracle child. He is suffering, yes, but he is alive when he should not be.

You see, there were 1,550 students in that school. Widlove was one of three that survived.