The Berkeley Beacon

Issue date: 2/4/10 Section: News

China shattered. Pictures crashed to the floor. The whole house swayed and bucked in time with the shaking earth below it. For a hellish half-minute, freshman Christine Bernard clenched the nearest doorframe in her home in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Around 4:50 p.m. on Jan. 12 she was at home chatting on Skype with an American friend, when the glass on the windows began to vibrate and rattle.

"If there were an earthquake right now, [first] you'd hear the sound of the glass shaking," the marketing major said. "Then you'd feel it."

The magnitude 7.0 quake struck seconds later.

Bernard said she ran to safety under her bathroom door as the ground shook violently for about 30 seconds, long enough for her to ask herself, "When is this going to be over?"

She called to her aunt, clinging to the staircase banister a few feet away to join her under the doorframe, when her mother burst through the front door and took cover beneath the adjacent doorframe. Bernard said.

As soon as the shaking stopped, Bernard said her aunt and mother ran to join her brother outside in the driveway.

Bernard stopped to checked her computer for an Internet connection first. The Internet and phones had stopped working. Her brother, wary of the house's weakened infrastructure, shouted to her, "Are you crazy?" until she too was safely outside, she said.

To her left, she saw that a huge cloud of dust had enveloped the mountains surrounding her cliffside neighborhood; to her right, the rock wall that fenced her property had crumbled. In the valley below, the bidonville, the Haitian term for shantytown, had disappeared in the haze. It took only minutes for the street to flood with screaming people.

"I don't know what's better, to be alive and think everyone is dead, or to be under rubble and not know if you will get out," Bernard said.

Around her the injured wailed, the pious prayed and sang "Hallelujah" and parents frantically called to missing children as Bernard and a few neighbors explored the dusty roads of their gated suburb, going from house to house to see who, if anyone, survived.

That night neighbors camped outside their houses, too afraid of a rooftop collapsing to venture in. Before bed, Bernard's mother retrieved pillows, blankets and supplies from inside.

"Everything you had in the house, all the supplies, you'd go and share it with other people," the freshman said. "You knew you'd run out of it somehow anyway, so you figured why not give it to people who need it?"

Bernard said she tried to strengthen herself and family for the impending aftermath.

"Guys, let's start to be strong, 'cause we're going to hear about people that we know are dead," she said. "We have to start psychologically getting prepared for that."

The next day, Bernard drove to Toussaint Louverture International Airport, in the heart of the devastated capital, only to find all commercial flights were canceled. Traffic congested the roads to the airport and rubble from crumbled edifices made some areas difficult to pass, she said.

Bernard was shocked to see that prestigious buildings such as the Hotel Montana, the UN building and the presidential palace lay in ruins, indiscriminately razed alongside the shantytowns.

"The first thing I thought was 'there's nothing left in my country, there's nothing left,'" she said.

With the airport inaccessible, Bernard's father hurried to plan a way to get his daughter back to Boston. He decided their best option, was to go by bus to the Dominican Republic, which borders Haiti on the eastern half of the island of Hispaniola.

After three more days of waiting for news and trying to devise an exit strategy, Bernard was able to book a flight out of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic.

By then the neighborhood was abuzz with rumors that the Dominicans planned to close the border, fearing the spread of disease and overwhelming droves of refugees. So Bernard and a friend rushed by bus to the border.

She spent the night at a friend's house in the Dominican capital, awaiting her flight the next morning. She said it was the first night she slept indoors.

"I have to tell you, it was weird to sleep in a bed," she said.

The following morning, she flew to Boston. Her brother arrived in New York the next day.

However, not all of Bernard's family escaped unscathed. Her baby cousin, barely two months old, died when the infant's house collapsed.

"I didn't even know her name," Bernard said. "I hadn't even seen her."

Bernard said she remains hopeful and wants to return to Haiti "as soon as possible."

"It's your home," she said. "No matter how bad it might be, how bad it might look, it's where you feel good."

And the biting winds of wintry Boston cannot substitute her love for the Caribbean island.

"When people ask me, 'Where do you live?' I say, 'I live in Haiti.' They say, 'No, you live in P-Row.' And I say, 'This is not my house, I live in Haiti.'"

After an interview with The Beacon, Bernard agreed to be photographed. Standing on the sidewalk across from 150 Boylston, a Green Line train rumbled under her feet.

"What was that?" she said. "Oh-it was only a train."

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