Miracle Boy Survivor of

the Haiti Earthquake

An estimated 100,000 children were left
orphaned by the January 2010 earthquake in
Haiti, but Kiki, luckily, is not one of them.

D eep in the Haitian countryside, three hours from teeming, Moise

“Kiki” Joachin shares a two-room wooden shack with his older sister and
younger brother, their mother, her parents, and four or five other
relatives. They buy food from vendors down the road, a strain on their
minuscule budget.
That’s where he was January 12, 2010, when a massive earthquake struck
Haiti. As the ground began convulsing, Kiki’s mother, Gracia Raymond,
ran from the porch of their apartment building in search of her five-year-
old son, David, who was outside fetching water. Bloodied by falling cinder
blocks, she began frantically burrowing through the crumbled concrete
toward her five other kids. She could make no headway.

K iki’s father, Odinel, was

trapped in his office at the
Haitian customs service. When
she told him that five of their
children were buried in the
wreckage of their home, “I asked
a neighbor to chop off my head,”
Odinel recalls, “because I had no
reason to live.”
For eight days, Kiki was buried beneath the ruins of his apartment
building. He and Sabrina, 11, huddled in a tiny space under tons of rubble,
with no food or water, barely able to move; nearby lay Titite, four, and the
bodies of their little sisters Yeye, nine, and Didine, 15 months.
“When our house fell down, I thought I was going to die,” Kiki recalls. On
their fifth day in the ruins, he says, “I saw my brother die right next to
me.”
Then on the eighth day, a neighbor rummaging for her possessions heard
Kiki’s faint cries for water. Two firefighters, spent the next four hours
cautiously drilling through the debris and finally reached Kiki and his
sister.
As Kiki was raised from the hole, he broke into a blazing grin and flung
out his arms in a victory gesture.
In the midst of a disaster that killed 220,000 people, Sabrina and Kiki’s
rescue was a welcome bit of good news. “I smiled because I was free,” Kiki
told reporters. “I smiled because I was alive.”

BY KENNETH MILLER