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'I buried my daughter'

Louicius Michel thought he could return to teaching a few weeks after digging his daughter’s body out of the rubble in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Haiti Earthquake
People stand in the rubble of a collapsed building in the aftermath of a massive earthquake in Port-au-Prince. A 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti on Jan. 12

Louicius Michel thought he could return to teaching a few weeks after digging his daughter’s body out of the rubble in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

He thought he was strong enough.

“I have tried. Last week, I couldn’t. This Monday I tried and . . . (Tuesday), it was so hard on me, I was down and I had to be replaced,” said Michel, a business professor at Canadian University College in Lacombe who is originally from Haiti.

Michel is taking time off work, praying for guidance and for some indication of what to do with his life, he said, audibly distraught over the phone on Wednesday.

His story is heartbreaking . He was in Port-au-Prince over Christmas, teaching and visiting his 14-year-old daughter Alice. He left a week before the earthquake and had told Alice she could join him in Canada when she finished her schooling.

“It was a bad decision,” said Michel. “That was my choice, to let her finish high school in Haiti before coming here definitively . . . I said we have time.”

Back in Canada, Michel heard after class one day about the disasterous earthquake.

He immediately called his daughter’s home, where she lives with her mother, but no one picked up the phone.

Michel is divorced from Alice’s mother.

He flew to the Dominican Republic and arrived in the Haitian capital a week after the earthquake, which he says was “like Hiroshima or Nagasaki.” He found his daughter’s building collapsed and hired a team of workers to start digging.

“That was a pretty good neighbourhood,” he said. “I thought she was safe.”

Alice’s mother, who was on the top floor of the building when the quake struck, was badly injured, said Michel.

On the second Saturday morning following the quake, after digging all day Friday, Michel found Alice’s body.

“And I was alone. I had to wash my daughter’s body, clean it and rub it,” Michel said, explaining that he then took her body to a pastor for a Christian service before finding a cemetery, paying thousands of dollars for a plot, and burying her himself.

Students of his from Africa were also killed in the quake. Many of the bodies went unclaimed and a government truck delivered those to a mass grave.

“I am mad and sad at the same time, and confused . . . I am pleading with the Lord to tell me where he wants me to be and in what capacity he would have me serve.”

As quiet and choked with grief as Michel is when discussing his daughter, whose age at death he’s calculated down to the day, he is inversely impassioned and articulate when discussing the Haitian government’s leadership, or lack thereof, that he says exacerbated the natural disaster.

A Haiti benefit concert is being held at CUC on Friday night at 7:30 p.m. Although Michel won’t attend, one of the student organizers has said they wanted to honour their professor with the event.

mgauk@www.reddeeradvocate.com