Skal Labissiere – photo by Kyle Kurlick | Commercialappeal.com
After returning home from basketball practice on Jan. 12, 2010, 13-year-old Skal Labissiere went to the bathroom to wash up before dinner. He often thinks about the hours that followed.
“The house started shaking all the sudden,” he said. “… The house just collapsed on us.”
Labissiere, then a seventh-grade student in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, his mother and younger brother were trapped and horrified by the effects of a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated their country and killed more than 200,000.
For three hours, Labissiere was trapped with “a wall on my back,” and even as he and his family prayed to be rescued, he said, “I didn’t see any way of getting out of the house.”
