Thursday 21 January, 2010

Special Report

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, centre, visits the collapsed UN headquarters during his visit to Port-au-Prince, Sunday, 17 Jan. 2010.

Buried in rubble, dad says goodbye in a note to his family

By Andrew Halloway

American filmmaker Dan Woolley was trapped for 65 hours under the wreckage of his Haiti hotel, and wrote what might have been his last words to his family.

Yet those last words were not a message of despair. He urged his young sons and wife to trust in God – whether he lived or died.

With a fractured leg and gashed head, dying seemed the more likely outcome. But Dan prayed that he would live to see his family again, and his prayers were answered. In fact, it seems God give him an amazing calmness of mind so that he could help to save himself.

Dan, a member of the Christian mission organisation Compassion International, had the presence of mind to download a first aid application on his iPhone to find out how to treat his own injuries, and used the light from his camera to look for the safest place to stay while waiting for rescue – or death.

Tons of wreckage collapsed around Dan in the lobby of his hotel when the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck. “I just saw the walls rippling and just explosive sounds all around me. It all happened incredibly fast,” he says.

After the shaking stopped, Dan was injured but still alive. But all around was dark. That, combined with the fact that Dan is shortsighted and had lost his glasses in the quake, meant that he couldn’t see a way out or where to move to in case aftershocks brought down even more masonry.

But Dan used the focusing light on his digital SLR camera to illuminate his surroundings, and took pictures that he reviewed on his camera. Soon he was able to figure out where he was and where to go. He identified a lift shaft and decided he would hole up there while he waited to be rescued — or to die.

While in the lift shaft, he used an iPhone first aid application to treat the compound fracture of his leg and a cut on his head. He was able to make a bandage and tourniquet for his leg and to stop the bleeding from his head wound. The app also warned him not to fall asleep if he felt he was going into shock, so he set his phone’s alarm to go off every 20 minutes.

Believing he’d bought himself some time, he got out his notebook and began to scrawl, with difficulty in the dark, the words that he hoped would be discovered after his death – should that be his fate.

Back home in America after having been rescued, Dan showed his blood-stained notebook to the press.

Sitting with his wife, Christina, in Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, Dan said: “I always wanted to survive, but I knew that was something that I couldn’t control. So I decided if I had to go, I wanted to leave some last notes for them.”

Fighting back his emotions, he read an entry he addressed to his sons, Josh, 6, and Nathan, 3:

“I was in a big accident. Don’t be upset at God. He always provides for his children, even in hard times. I’m still praying that God will get me out, but he may not. But he will always take care of you.”

Dan admitted it wasn’t easy to write what may have become his goodbye message: “Boy, I cried. Obviously, no one wants to come to that point. I also didn’t want to just get found after having some time — God gave me some time — to think and to pray and to come to grips with the reality. I wanted to use that time to do everything I could for my family. If that could be surviving, get out, then I would. If it could be just to leave some notes that would help them in life, I would do that.”

Dan had gone to Haiti to make a film for Compassion International about the impact of poverty on the people there. He had just returned to the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince from a day of filming when the earthquake began.

Dan believes God had a hand in his survival and rescue by a French rescue team. Many other people failed to emerge from the six stories of rubble that he was trapped under.

“A lot of people were praying for safety for this trip,” Woolley said. “A lot of prayers go out for the work that we do, so I believe that God was present with me and he decided he wanted me to survive, and so he was with me and helped me in those moments.”

Dan’s wife Christina admits: “I went through moments of despair. I gave up several times, and I thought I’d never see Dan again.” But, like Dan, Christina’s faith sustained her. She knew that “wherever Dan was, God was holding Dan in the palm of his hand. I just didn’t know if that was in Haiti or in heaven. I was begging God that Dan would still be in Haiti.”

Looking forward to seeing his sons again, and showing them the notes he wrote, Dan said: “That’s going to be a very emotional experience. I’ve spoken to them on the phone several times, but to just hug their heads and touch their curly hair… it’s going to be amazing, a dream come true.”

Photo credit: despardes.com