Boy rescued 8 days after quake now a Haitian celebrity

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A little over a week ago, 5-year-old Monley Elize was gulping fruit juice and standing on two small shaky feet in a
medical clinic here, the heralded survivor of eight days buried in the
rubble of his home.

Since then, he’s been featured on CNN and he and his uncle also did a spot for NBC. The first day’s story in The Los Angeles Times brought dozens of offers of help. Around Port-au-Prince, where his was a rare good-news story in a city devastated by the Jan. 12 earthquake, the pint-sized survivor is recognized on local buses, his uncle says.

On Friday, Monley was staying deep inside a
sprawling tent city, where 12 people — Monley, his two brothers, an
uncle, aunt, cousins and other homeless relatives — share a
15-by-15-foot patch of brown earth. For shade, they were using a
flowered bedsheet stretched between scavenged wood planks. His aunt,
Kazmita, was boiling rice for supper.

When the earthquake struck, Monley said he had tried
to get out of his family’s ground-floor apartment in the three-story
building where they lived, but he was blocked by a falling door. He
squatted in a corner under a small metal table as the house collapsed.

In the eight days that followed, the uncle, Gary Elize, and other relatives dug out the bodies of Monley’s parents. As they looked for Monley, they were convinced he was dead.

Elize found the child’s leg and was shocked when it
moved. Minutes later, Elize was holding the severely dehydrated little
boy in his arms and running to the main road.

Passing by at the time was Neil Joyce, 54, a San Diego doctor with the Los Angeles-based
relief agency International Medical Corps. Joyce put Monley and his
uncle in the car and drove them to the IMC clinic. Doctors and nurses
treated Monley over several hours and discharged him that evening.

Last weekend, Monley and his uncle returned to the
IMC clinic, where nurses and doctors fussed over him. The nurse who
originally treated him, Gabriella McAdoo, who works in the emergency room at Stanford University Medical Center, spoon-fed him ravioli from a can and pronounced him in excellent health.

Monley agreed: “I feel good,” he said.

As they were leaving, Elize pulled a reporter aside.
“If you see that doctor who brought us to the hospital,” he said,
“would you please tell him, ‘Thank you.’ “

Elize, whose home also was destroyed, says he isn’t
sure what the family will do. Sleeping in the city of refugees has been
difficult, and the family is awakened frequently by shouts and other
noises. “We don’t have a home anymore, and we don’t have anywhere to
go,” he said.

Monley has an aunt, a nurse in Florida,
who has been providing some help. In addition, Elize said, other tent
city residents, touched by Monley’s remarkable story, have given some
of their own meager food supplies to help the family.

A TV network offered to put Monley and his uncle in
a hotel room for a night last weekend for its story, Elize said. But
the boy and his uncle left after a few hours because Monley was worried
about staying inside a building and he missed his cousins.

“He was eating an apple at the hotel and began
crying,” Elize said. “I asked him what was wrong, and he said he wanted
to give the rest of the apple to his cousins.” Elize took Monley back
to the tent city, where, on Friday, he was out playing with new friends.

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