Survival

{ |< } { < Prev } { Next > } { >| }

You're sitting outside your destroyed apartment. All your efforts to lift bits of the rubble have been ineffectual and you're beginning to realize that all the stuff you used to own had been thoroughly crushed when the four-story building fell. It'd been two days since the quake and you'd become very mindful of the hunger pangs that had set in. Was food the main concern, though? As far as you've been able to tell, neither your mom, nor your sister were accounted for. A tear wells in your eye, though you blush it off with your dirty finger and wipe it onto your shirt. Your younger brother sits nearby. You'd been walking him home from school when the tragedy struck. Jesus, you think. This isn't the sort of thing a twelve-year-old is supposed to be forced to cope with.

You go reach you arm around his shoulder. "C'mon, kid. It's just you and me now. They probably didn't think to come meet us at home. I bet they're safe at Auntie and Uncles house on the other side of town."

After wandering the streets for a couple hours, you ran into a couple of old friends near the rumble that had used to be a supermarket. One of them calls out to you, "Come on over here. Everything's free." He hands you a box of Ritz Crackers. "Eat up, you look like you need it."

You slide a sleave of crackers out of the box and hand it to your little brother, then take a second for yourself. "Is there other stuff in there that we can get?"

"The whole store, my friend. It's all ripe."

You know he meant "ripe for the taking" instead of "ripe and in season". The lack of electricity would have caused the fruits, meats, and dairy to go bad over the past two days. In any case, this was likely the only place in town that had readily available food. "Hermanito, dump the school books out of your backpack and follow me into the store." You'd already dumped the things you had been carrying around.

"But mama said these books are my future."

"Not this week they aren't," you say to him. "Our priorities have changed."

Everything inside the store is a wreck, but you eventually find the things you wanted. As your leaving, your brother's backpack is full of granola bars and Pop Tarts and yours has necessary survival gear like matches, flashlights, extra batteries, and a crapload of medicine. Both of you carried a five-gallon jug of water in each hand. "It's heavy," winded your little brother.

"Hang in there," you say. "We aren't moving fast and it'll get lighter as we travel. We just want enough to last us until we can get out of the city." You look over to your friends who seem content to loiter in front of the rumble that used to be the supermarket. You ask them, "Do you guys have a plan?" None of them answers. "Want to help check out the radio station? There should be some equipment there that might be useful."

Their crew joins you, and you march a quarter mile to the radio station where you used to work on weekends to make some extra cash. After considerable effort, you were able to organize the group to help you lift some of the more portable equipment down from the second floor broadcast booth. For all you cared, they could do whatever they wanted with most of the equipment as long as you got the ham radio that usually sit collecting dust in the back of the equipment closet. To lug it out of there you had to sacrifice one of your jugs of water, but it was more than worth it to be able to get news.

You pop a few batteries into the unit and tune it until a staticy voice came through. "The seaport is badly damaged. The airport is overwhlemed. The city palace has been reduced to ruins. Rescue efforts are concentrating on finding bodies under the rubble. Temporary tent villages are forming around the city."

"What are we going to do?" asks your little brother.

"We're gonna surive. We've gotta get out of this city. We'll walk until we come to a place that hasn't been destroyed and then we'll start over. That's all there is to it".

Original photograph by Marcello Casal Jr of Agencia Brasil (a public Brazilian news agency). The image was taken after the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. It shows people in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Bel-Air attempting to collect goods left in evacuated houses. Alterate image source is here. More details are on Wikipedia.org.

{ |< } { < Prev } { Next > } { >| }