ARTICLE - HEARTBREAK HOTEL

HEARTBREAK HOTEL: A YEAR AFTER THE HAITI EARTHQUAKE, HOTEL MONTANA OWNERS STRUGGLE TO REBUILD
(Palm Beach Post News) - By Daphne Duret

PETIONVILLE — Darkness still enveloped the air in the moment Marc Yves Ulysse finally caught his first glimpse of sky.

For nearly two days he had been trapped inside his office in the accounting department at Haiti's luxurious Hotel Montana, after a 7.0 earthquake stuck the island nation on this day last year, killing an estimated 300,000 people and trapping thousands like Ulysse in homes, offices and public buildings.

The 29-year-old had bent and twisted his body, bloodying his forearms as he wriggled from under five stories of wreckage with only the light from his cellphone and the voice of a Martiniquan rescue worker as his guides. Feet away from the space he left behind at 4 a.m. were the bodies of his supervisor and the 6-year-old grandson of one of the hotel owners, who had both been pinned under chunks of ceiling and uttered their last words as he tried in vain to help them.

Ulysse expected to see severe damage to the hotel's many rooms, shopping center and conference halls.

As he stood for the first time in the open air, he looked out at the place where the Montana should have been. But all he saw were stars, dust and sky.

"I can say that there was no hotel anymore," he said.

Trying to move forward
Even now, a year later, Ulysse feels a void in his heart when he drives along Route Canapé Vert and sees an empty space in the place where the hotel sat so high on the mountain that it was visible from the street.

The bulk of the wreckage has long been cleared from the hotel where hundreds died, including four students and two faculty members from Lynn University in Boca Raton.

This was one of the rescue sites that captivated the world's attention in the earthquake's aftermath as crews worked for seemingly endless days - and nights - to free survivors.

Now it is the place where sisters Gerthe Cardoso and Nadine Cardoso­-Riedl spend the day walking from the hotel's administration building to the razed construction site and then over to a just-completed memorial garden in honor of those who died.

Cardoso-Riedl was trapped in the hotel herself for more than four days before her rescue.

"It is a very difficult time for us," Cardoso-Riedl said in French. "We're passing through our period of mourning right now. I try my best to focus on what is positive and try to move forward."

But progress at the Montana, like many other places in this quake-­ravaged country, is moving at a maddeningly slow pace. The hotel's insurers have yet to disburse the money the sisters need to rebuild, so although the site is clear and construction has begun on some administrative buildings, the hotel itself is still nonexistent.

Built in 1946, the Montana had become a sprawling five-story compound on the mountainside that was the hotel of choice for many international visitors. Work was completed on a vast shopping mall inside the hotel one year before the devastating quake.

Struggle and celebration
Cardoso keeps busy as she waits to rebuild her hotel. As landscapers were putting the finishing touches on the memorial garden Monday afternoon, she bent low at the waist and knees; a straw hat was slung low over her eyes as she gripped a small pair of gardening shears, cutting withered branches of plants surrounding the site.

She said she didn't know when the insurers would pay, but the rebuilding would not begin until that day came.

"To do anything here you need money," she said with a shrug.

On the road leading to the hotel below, Dan Woolley stood for a moment and marveled at the place where he could have died a year ago.

Woolley, who famously used a first-aid app on his iPhone to treat injuries to his leg and head during the 65 hours he was trapped inside what used to be the Montana's lobby, was on the second day of his first trip to Haiti as a website builder for Compassion International when the earthquake hit.

In his book Unshaken: Rising from the Ruins of the Hotel Montana, Woolley chronicles how he wrote goodbye letters to his wife and sons and led a group of survivors in singing a doxology just moments before a French rescue crew gave them their first indication that they would be liberated from the hotel ruins.

Woolley made it out alive, but one of his colleagues at Compassion International, David Hames, died less than 3 feet from him.

"The most challenging thing to realize is that the difference between life and death was just inches," he said. "I got a reminder of just how precious life is."

For a while, Woolley couldn't decide whether to mourn the people who died or celebrate the fact that he survived.

In the end, the 40-year-old father of two from Colorado Springs said he decided to do both.

'It will take a long time'
As for Ulysse, he no longer works at the hotel and plans to move to Canada to pursue a doctoral degree in business administration. The year since the earthquake has done little to remove the images in his mind of the stacks of dead bodies he saw on the street along the road from the Montana to his parents' home in Pernier the day after he was rescued.

Both he and Woolley say they are optimistic that the Montana and Haiti's other landmarks will be rebuilt.

In the meantime, Ulysse remembers the people he left in the darkness of the destroyed hotel, hoping their memory will fill the churned earth, crumbled buildings and empty skies.

"The Montana wasn't built in a day, so it will take a long time," Ulysse said of the rebuilding.

"But it will come back. And Haiti will come back. I have hope for that."