Haiti victim's recovery: One step at a time

Solange Charles sits in the kitchen of a sprawling Sandbridge home, and reflects on how life turns in a moment.

For her, that moment was 4:53 p.m. on Jan. 12.

That’s when she was in another kitchen, in her native Haiti.

“I lived in a nice house and everything was wonderful,” the 67-year-old woman says in lightly accented English.

But in that January instant, an earthquake sent the walls tumbling down upon her. She was trapped under rubble for 20 minutes. Then she sat in a pickup for five days waiting for help.

Before that moment, she was a neighborhood hairdresser. She and her husband were enjoying the peace of their retirement years. She had both her legs.

But afterward, “every­thing went under the ground,” she says, waving a hand in the air.

For Solange, the past three months have been a mix of emotions: She’s saddened by all she’s lost, grateful to have been rescued.

She knows she is lucky to be recuperating in the United States rather than Haiti.

Here, there are doctors and nurses who care for her in an antiseptic hospital.

Rehabilitation experts who fit her for a prosthetic leg. And this day in March, physical therapist Melissa Diehl is teaching her to walk again.

Solange puts the prosthetic up against her amputated limb and pulls an elasticized tubing material up toward what’s left of her leg.

“Did you hear the click yet?” asks her son, Joseph Charles, trying to determine whether the device is in place.

“Not yet.”

Finally, she feels it lock in place, and she stands up from her wheelchair with Diehl’s help.

After 10 minutes of stepping, shifting and balancing, Solange pauses a moment.

“Do you need to sit and rest?” Diehl asks.

“No, I need to walk.”

“You are walking, Mummy,” Joseph says. “You are off to the races.”

Solange might still be in Haiti if not for her son, a music producer who moved to Virginia Beach more than a decade ago to work with R&B artist Teddy Riley.

Joseph, 36, grew up in Brooklyn, where his parents had moved from Haiti in the 1960s. The couple lived there more than 40 years and raised a family of eight. When Solange’s husband retired from teaching school in the late 1990s, they moved back to Haiti.

On Jan. 12, Joseph’s cell phone started vibrating with phone calls and text messages that read, “Hope your family’s OK.”

He turned on the TV and saw Port-au-Prince in ruins.

Ten frantic minutes later, he was able to get through to his father, Saintoine Charles. He was working outside on a property about 45 minutes from where he lived with his wife.

Joseph told his father, who is 72, to stay put and not search for his wife and their 12-year-old nephew, Michael Thomas, whom they are raising. It was too dangerous.

“Luckily, he didn’t listen,” Joseph said.

Three days after the quake, Joseph’s phone rang. He rejoiced at the sound of Michael’s voice. The three had been reunited.

At first, Saintoine didn’t tell Joseph the extent of his mother’s injuries. But when Solange’s leg began to turn black a few days later, he called Joseph to tell him she might die soon and that he should tell her goodbye.

“It’s not looking good,” Saintoine said.

Joseph refused to let his father hand over the phone to her: “I will see you. I am not talking to her.”

When Joseph got off the phone, his wife, Isabel, said: “You know what you have to do.”

Joseph decided to go after her.

He contacted WVEC-TV anchor Regina Mobley, who hooked him up with U.S. Rep. Glenn Nye. The documents needed for travel under normal circumstances were under debris in Haiti, so Nye agreed to secure replacement documents for Joseph to bring his mother to Virginia for medical care.

“I had zero plans,” he said. “I went into my investment account, cleaned it out, and flew into the Dominican Republic.”

He was joined by one of his sisters, who lives in Queens, and his brother-in-law, a firefighter from New Orleans. Together they began the journey to Port-au-Prince.

Along the way, Joseph had to bribe people to rent the car, find a driver, get across the border, and find another rental car. At one point, a man asked him to hand over all his money, but Joseph was able to hide most of his cash in a money belt and tell the man he was giving him everything he had.

He pleaded with people along the way: “I have to get to my mother.”

For five days, he didn’t sleep and barely ate.

Once in Port-au-Prince, he didn’t know where to go. Everything was in shambles: Bridges were down, roads impassable, nothing as it had been before.

“I had no idea where I was going,” Joseph said. “I just kept asking and asking and asking.”

Finally, he found his parents. His father grabbed him tight, refusing to let go. His mother sat dazed in a pickup , her face sunken and thin. When she saw him, Solange thought she might be in heaven. His touch brought her back to earth.

“I knew you would come for me – I knew it, I knew it.”

He took her to a hospital that was so crowded she had to lie on the floor, her family holding an IV bag with fluids that replenished her.

“I saw people die in front of me,” she said.

Her leg was amputated by American volunteer doctors while Joseph went throughout the hospital using his Creole and French to interpret for volunteers. One doctor took his arm and said, “I need you to tell this lady’s husband she’s going to die.”

Joseph then went to the U.S. Embassy, where Nye had arranged for papers that would allow Solange and Michael to travel to the United States. He pushed his way through throngs of people desperate for a way out. Nye also contacted the airport in Port-au-Prince to clear the way for the family to be evacuated to the United States.

They flew from Haiti to Florida, where Solange stayed in a hospital two nights before flying to Norfolk on a Mercy Medical Airlift flight.

Nye met them at the airport on Jan. 28. Solange went to Sentara Virginia Beach General Hospital, under an agreement in which the hospital would take emergency medical victims.

She spent three weeks recovering there.

When Diehl asks Solange whether she has any pain, Solange waves her hand.

“No, I left it at home,” she says lightly.

She misses her husband, who stayed in Haiti to clean up and secure their property. She worries about Michael, who hasn’t been in school since the day of the earthquake: “He’s a smart boy.”

He was with her that day when the earthquake struck, but in a different part of the building where they lived.

“It was so terrible,” he remembers. “The whole place was shaking. The house was trembling. The lights were blinking, and there was smoke. I was dizzy and stuff.

“Afterwards, the house was like a pancake. The first thing I thought was, 'M aybe a crazy person hit the house.’”

When he found his aunt, her face was white with dust, the debris of a wall on top of her. He ran to get help, which is when he discovered it was not just his house that had fallen.

Devastation stretched as far as he could see.

It took six neighbors 20 minutes to free his aunt.

“He saved my life, that boy,” Solange says.

Michael has a shy manner , and smiles throughout the telling of his tale, even the hardest parts, like hearing the screams of people in the streets. A baby, dead under rubble. Friends, relatives now gone.

“It was kind of scary,” he says. “But you can’t be scared forever.”

For all the horror he saw, he also tucked away good memories, and he’s eager to talk about those.

“We slept in the yard. The sky was clear. I slept with the dogs, and I looked at the stars.”

Now he is learning about life in Virginia Beach.

Once Solange was discharged from the hospital, Jewish Family Service of Tidewater helped with a home health nurse and physical therapy at Joseph’s home in Sandbridge. She’s since improved enough to go to a rehab center three times a week.

For Solange, it is one step at a time now.

“I have no clothes, no things. They are under the ground. People give me a little bit here, little bit there.”

She stands at the base of the stairs to tackle them for the first time. Diehl tells her to put her right leg up on the first step, balance herself, then pull her left leg up. On the way down, it’s the reverse.

“Remember, up with the good, down with the bad,” Diehl says.

It’s a motto Solange can live by.

“Look,” she tells her son, “I am walking up the stairs!”

“Well done, Mummy,” Joseph says. “Well done.”

Elizabeth Simpson, (757) 446-2635, elizabeth.simpson@pilotonline.com