Search Teams From Around the World Witness Mini-Miracles, Singing Survivors, to Cap Week

Written by geri Tuesday, 26 January 2010

(Updated Jan. 26) Search and rescue teams from every corner of the world, from Iceland to Israel, Belgium to Nicaragua, are searching the ruins and still finding survivors.

"After almost eight days, it is almost a miracle. It was a great satisfaction because we thought we would not find anybody else alive," said the Nicaraguancrew chief.

Several inspiring rescues this week kept hope alive for relatives, some waiting near a Cathedral where an elderly woman was rescued along with four others, and others near a shopping center, where a 25-year-old was pulled from the rubble, smiling and even singing, more than one week after the earthquake toppled the building to the ground. (See inspiring videos below.)

Enu Zizi, 69, was pulled out by expert teams from Mexico and South Africa who worked for two hours to extract her. She suffered with possibly a broken leg, but "was not critically injured."

Zizi told her rescuers, "I love you," upon being pulled from the rubble. (Catholic Spirit)

At midnight, Wednesday morning, French and Turkish workers freed a younger woman, Hoteline Losana, 25, from the second floor of a shopping center while a parachute team built a rope and harness system to lower her stretcher 50 feet to the ground.

Watch the uplifting video of these two rescues from ITN, via MSNBC ... and at the bottom, an AP report via the Wash Post...

"There have been other extraordinary stories of children and adults surviving several days under collapsed buildings," reports AFP. "An unidentified, 18-month-old child was found alive on Monday six days after the quake."

"Medics at an Israeli field hospital outside the capital also treated Jean-Louis Brahms, an eight-month-old boy trapped for five days under his family's house."

As of January 24, international teams had rescued 133 people from the debris of collapsed buildings, including a young man in a hotel who had survived more than 11 days in the rubble, before a Greek team saved him.

In the latest rescue, U.S. troops pulled a man alive from the rubble of a building in Haiti's destroyed capital today, two weeks after a massive earthquake rattled the country. He was severely dehydrated but, "He's going to make it."

In other good news, some 50 orphans whose paperwork had been processed prior to the quake arrived in the United States for treatment and adoption.

Aid donation totals reflect a massive global spirit, with more than $1.2 billion in pledges collected in just one week to fund relief efforts for Haiti, the United Nations said on Tuesday.