Haiti earthquake: ‘I feel good,’ says young survivor

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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 appeared on NBC. The initial report in The Times brought dozens of offers of help. Around Port-au-Prince, where Monley’s 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 tried to get out of his family’s ground-floor apartment, but he was blocked by a falling door. He squatted in a corner under a small metal table as the three-story building collapsed.

Continue reading Young Haiti quake survivor is doing well.