11 Days

Eleven days.  What is that worth to you?  How many hopes, prayers, frustrations, and tears?  What can you accomplish in that amount of time?  What can you build up?  What can you tear down?

For Wismond Exantus, the past eleven days were not measured so much by tasks crossed off of a to-do list.  I doubt they were even measured in seconds, minutes, or hours as he likely had nothing on which to keep track of such things.  Rather, Wismond's last eleven days were measured in tiny bites of a few precious provisions...in breaths, in and out, in and out...in hopeful taps against the rubble under which he was buried.

Wismond was working as store clerk in a hotel in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, when the earthquake struck last week.  In seconds, he went from standing and working in a functioning store to crouching in a life-saving pocket amongst piles of concrete and debris.  With only soda, beer, and cookies from the store for nourishment, he crouched and waited for help to come...help that arrived almost too late...but not quite.

I don't know Wismond, and I likely never will.  I don't know what kind of person he was before the earthquake, and I don't know how he'll choose to use this life which was spared by an extraordinary series of events.  But I like to believe this is a young man full of hope, a young man who possesses a strength of spirit few of us will ever achieve.  To survive 11 days alone, helpless, and vulnerable while buried alive and waiting, just waiting, for someone to hear him is a true miracle.  I don't believe it happened by chance.  I believe good will come out of this, not only in the more intimate picture of this young man but also in the greater landscape of Haiti.

My heart breaks and my tears fall for the Haitians.  Their pain is incomprehensible to me.  I have never experienced such destruction.  It's ironic, I suppose, that my sympathetic heartbreak offered from miles and miles away is comforted by the strength of the Haitian people themselves and their resiliency in the face of such loss.  Wismond's story lifts my spirits and gives me hope.  It renews my belief in miracles, a belief that has never really faltered but has grown stagnate at times.  Tonight as I close my eyes and offer my prayers for Haiti and others around the world experiencing tremendous suffering, I do so not hoping for another miracle tomorrow but expecting one.