Unable to reach his sister in Port-au-Prince, Fritz Aristilde did the only thing he could, scouring Internet news sites for photographs of the disaster that befell Haïti’s capital city on Tuesday. It was his only window into the pandemonium that was once his home.
Aristilde, 36, a property manager and co-owner of the Café Fasika restaurant in Clarkston, was hoping that among the images of collapsed buildings, downed power lines and people running for safety he might find her.
He last spoke with her at Christmas.
“Not knowing is killing me,” said Aristilde, unable to reach her on her mobile phone. “I haven’t slept all night.”
Many of the Haitians who came by the restaurant Wednesday consoled one another while organizing a relief drive across Atlanta. But many faced the same plight.
The earthquake that devastated the capital and surrounding region knocked down power lines and some cellular towers, leaving scores of Atlanta Haitians unable to get any word about their relatives.
Some of them, like Aristilde, were uploading pictures of their loved ones to social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, asking their network of friends still in Haïti about those who were unaccounted for.
Others like Emmauela Bois and her three cousins were calling and e-mailing relatives and friends in Atlanta, Miami and Boston, cross-checking who had yet to be contacted or who they looking for.
Bois said she was unable to reach her mother, who lives near Port-au-Prince in Delmas. Unlike others, Bois, an accounting student, said her mother’s phone rings but “she’s not picking up,” she said, holding back tears.
“Maybe she’s safe somewhere and she got out.”
Atlanta's Haitian community, estimated around 4,400 in the last U.S. Census, reverberated all day as news of the disaster seem to grow worse by the hour. Alpharetta resident Frantz Florestal, visiting family in Port-au-Prince when the quake struck, told a harrowing survivor's tale in a cellphone interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“You heard the noise under the ground, and it’s shaking and shaking, and everybody started running,” Florestal said. “Houses were falling and falling, all of the fences were falling, people were falling, people were crying.”
In 20 seconds, it was over, he said. There was nothing but rubble and dirt.
“You cannot see the air. All of the sudden it’s dark,” he said. “After that, you saw the sun. The sun was falling under the horizon.”
Florestal, 38, who moved to the U.S. from Haiti when he was 14, was speaking with a reporter when family members' crying could be heard in the background. Nearby, two of his cousins were trapped in a school where they had been studying to be electricians.
“Do you hear that? The rubble fell on them,” Florestal said. “They can’t take them out because there’s no help.”
That helplessness was transferred some 1,300 miles away in Atlanta. Elizabeth Seese, director of A Voice in the Wilderness, a non-profit based in Blairville, was shopping for medical supplies to send to Haiti late Tuesday when a supporter called to tell her about the earthquake.
“I was shocked,” said Seese. “I’m still in shock. It’s just too big for my brain to even take in. I can’t believe that there is a possibility that we’ve lost people we’ve loved and cared for over these years.”
A Voice in the Wilderness has operated a feeding program and Christian school in Haiti for the last 15 years, feeding about 300 children everyday in Carrefour Feuilles, about five miles west of Port-au-Prince.
For years, Cumberland Christian Academy in Austell, a sister school and very large supporter of the ministry, has help support the Good Shepherd Church in Carre four Feuilles, near where the earthquake hit.
The academy, Seese said, pays the $35 per month salaries of 15 faculty and staff members of the school. She learned late Tuesday that “our original Good Shepherd compound was totally destroyed. We had outgrown the compound and had moved to a larger building and we don’t know if it’s standing or not."
Sally Haas of Atlanta worried about the 9-year-old Haitian twins who stayed with her here last summer.
"I am desperately waiting to hear about them from their family," Haas said.
She has been to Haiti 17 times with Atlanta's Mission for Biblical Literacy. Haas helps coordinate the nonprofit's nutrition and education programs on the island country. One of the twins was brought to Atlanta seven years ago for an operation to remove a tumor. Haas took the little girl in before and after the operation until she recovered.
Haas remained friends with the family of the twins and brought both girls stay with her last summer.
"They are my family," Haas said.
At CARE's Atlanta headquarters, the rescue scramble had began early in the day. David Gazashvili, CARE's director of emergency response, said CARE's office in Port-au-Prince was standing and its 133 employees in the country are accounted for.
"We don't know about all our staff member's families," he said.
Gazashvili said it is still difficult to get information out of the country and commercial flights into Port-au-Prince have been canceled, though aid flights can still get in. He and an initial group of CARE staff members planned to leave Atlanta last night on a special Delta flight for Port-au-Prince.
Delta canceled its only regularly scheduled Wednesday flight for Haiti and airline spokesman Anthony Black had no details on when service would resume.
The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control has yet to be asked for assistance but spokesman Joe Quimby stressed that it is still early in the world’s response and the CDC often plays a role in the aftermath of major natural disasters such as earthquakes. He said the CDC has three fulltime federal employees in Haiti and only two had been accounted for.
Salvation Army Major Ron Busroe of Atlanta, who headed up the nonprofit and church in Haiti for six years, plans to return to the island Thursday with a team of experts who will led their response. He said he has had spotty communication with those in Haiti since the earthquake.
"Everything we are hearing from the news media can't capture what is happening down there," Busroe said. "I was talking to a Haitian friend. He said, ‘Our city is destroyed.' "
Reporters Christopher Quinn, Craig Schneider, Gracie Bond Staples and Kristi E. Swartz contributed to this article.
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