Moments before Haiti crumbles, Trisha Zakhour is resting in her apartment.
The Oak Harbor native lives in a comfortable home just above the capital city of Port-au-Prince.
It’s late afternoon Jan. 12 and her husband’s sister sits nearby and cuddles with Zakhour’s 2-week-old son.
Across Haiti, clocks tick to 4:53 p.m.
In Zakhour’s home, the ground jerks to life. The floor is a roiling, rough sea. Vases and knickknacks tumble off shelves and smash on the tile floor. The shaking pulls open dresser drawers and pushes over furniture.
For a few seconds, the women stare at one another. Then Zakhour realizes this earthquake is powerful and she thinks: There’s absolutely nowhere in the apartment to hide.
“We have to get out of the house!” her sister-in-law shrieks. “We have to get out!”
Outside, Haitians are streaming into the streets. Some raise their hands and wail to the heavens: “Jesus! Oh Jesus!”
Some pray. Others simply wander, stunned.
Zakhour hurries to a spot that overlooks Port-au-Prince, a bustling city of 2 million people. She expects to see the city, with its many shops, cement homes and shanties, stretching to the mountains. Instead, all she sees is dust. Only dust.
And then this terrible thought: What about my husband?
Evergreens to mango trees
Before Haiti, she grew up Trisha Koorn, a farm girl on rural Whidbey Island who rode horses and worked on her family’s 40 acres.
Her parents raised her and her three brothers as Christians. As a teenager, she traveled to Mexico on mission trips, helping build churches. The experience left a powerful impression. She could see God at work, she says, and her own power to help.
In 2000, she left Oak Harbor with a plan to teach at a Christian school in Haiti for a year, maybe two. She never came back.
By the time of the earthquake, she had carved out a good life with a Haitian man. Her husband, Tarek Zakhour, 35, manages a market in downtown Port-au-Prince. They married five years ago, after friends introduced them. Their son, Lucas, was born last month.
When Trisha Zakhour went to Haiti a decade ago, all she could see was the plague of grinding poverty: the beggars on the streets, the grime, the garbage, the stray dogs, the high walls topped with razor wire, the narrow streets with laundry lines drawn across them.
Somehow all of that made her want to help all the more.
Over time, she adjusted to the steamy heat, the rain that suddenly comes howling in, the mango and mahogany trees. She came to appreciate the way a near stranger would immediately treat her as family. She came to love these resilient people. Haiti became her home.
Living through the quake
Tarek Zakhour has just stepped into his office at the back of the One Stop Market, a small grocery at the bottom floor of a salmon pink building in Port-au-Prince.
At the market, Zakhour sells fresh produce, meats, cosmetics and assorted merchandise.
Some of his large extended family immigrated to Haiti from Syria, but he was born here. He speaks Creole, the language of the Haitian people, as well as French, Arabic and English.
He first feels the quake as a tiny tremble. Then the full force of the quake slams into the market.
Cans and bottles and boxes rocket off the market shelves and crash to the floor. Cement chunks rain down from the ceiling, some pelting him.
His eyes squeeze shut and he thinks: This is how somebody dies in an earthquake.
The shaking subsides. One of his employees is shrieking. He stumbles across the market, over the debris from the shelves, toward a shaft of light that leads out.
Outside in the parking lot, he looks back at the market. The top stories have collapsed. Somehow, the walls of the bottom-floor grocery held. All three people working in the market and all the customers escape unharmed. The fate of those in the top floors isn’t clear.
Tarek Zakhour immediately thinks of his wife and son, somewhere on the mountain behind a choking cloud of dust.
He climbs into his Suzuki Grand Vitara and begins driving through the city. Around him most of the buildings are rubble. People are wandering the streets, dazed, bleeding. Some are falling on their knees, screaming and praying.
He doesn’t get far before a policeman waves him to a stop and warns him the road is blocked. He abandons his car and begins picking his way up the mountain. Eventually he convinces a man to give him a ride on the back of his motorbike.
By then, Trisha has retreated to her sister-in-law’s yard, just down the road from her own. She’s holding her son in her lap, crying and praying for God to keep His hands on her husband.
Her son sleeps, unaware the world is falling apart and his father might be dead.
Trisha Zakhour hears the gate creak open. She sees her husband and they rush toward each other.
Such sweet relief when they find each other, alive.
Places they used to know
Too afraid to go inside, the couple lives outside after the quake.
They drag mattresses and blankets out of her sister-in-law’s home and sleep under a dark Caribbean sky.
Trisha Zakhour is afraid an aftershock might send debris tumbling down on the baby. They take turns holding him on their chests at night.
The Zakhours are more fortunate than many survivors in Haiti. They have some money and access to supplies others are looting down in the city. Their apartment is still standing. And they have the means to get out.
They quickly realize they need to leave — at least temporarily.
The government is unstable. Fresh drinking water and supplies won’t last. The situation at the American embassy in Haiti is desperate, with hundreds waiting for help. The baby doesn’t have an official birth certificate or other papers.
They eventually decide to drive over the border to the Dominican Republic.
As they drive through what’s left of Port-au-Prince, they snap photos of rubble, places they used to know: a bakery, shops, Tarek’s market. The aftermath is eerie and terrible and unrecognizable. To Trisha Zakhour, it seems as if everyone in the city simultaneously woke up from a dream and is now fleeing. The pot-holed two-lane road to the border is clogged with cars and trucks.
They arrived in Seattle on Jan. 21. For the past week, the Zakhours have stayed at Trisha’s parents’ home in Oak Harbor.
They want to go back. Tarek wants to help aid workers with translation or shuttle people and supplies in his car — if he can find gasoline. He wants to help his uncle build a new store. The school Trisha taught at survived the earthquake. She wants to go back and teach again. They know rebuilding won’t be easy, but they’re hopeful.
“I have a feeling God has larger plans for Haiti,” Tarek Zakhour says. “Things will change.”
Debra Smith: 425-339-3197, dsmith@heraldnet.com.
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