'We save 5 lives in 2 hours after quake' says Chinese peacekeeper
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"I'd just stepped out of the headquarters of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and was only 200 meters away from the building when the quake struck," recalled Wang Xueyan, a Chinese peacekeeper in the Caribbean nation.
For Wang, it was a nightmarish memory -- eight of her Chinese colleagues and MINUSTAH chief Hedi Annabi were buried under the flattened building after a magnitude-7.3 earthquake hit Haiti on Tuesday.
Four days later, their bodies were discovered.
"I was in a car. I felt two small shakes and first thought they were caused by my Uruguayan colleague sitting behind me. Then the jolts turned violent," said Wang.
"Such movements lasted for 20 seconds. We were enveloped in clouds of dust -- everyone was screaming and vehicles turned and toppled in the parking lot," she said.
Wang started to look for tools immediately to go back to save anyone alive in the MINUSTAH headquarters, when a local young man showed up asking for help at a collapsed building near the parking lot, where many UN workers lived.
It was a four-story building, and all of the upper constructions had caved in on the first floor. Wang and one of her Canadian colleagues saved five people trapped in the building.
Wang pulled two people, who were hurt in the leg and abdomen, out of the first floor when she heard "help!" from above. "I heard a lot of yells, men and women," she said.
She found two ladders and climbed to where the yells came. "The way out was totally blocked by wardrobes and debris," Wang said.
With very simple tools, Wang and her colleague worked for more than an hour. They had to hold the flashlight and keep balance on the ladder while digging through the rubble after the night fell.
"We had two aftershocks in the process, and the building could have collapsed at any time," Wang said.
They broke a small opening on the debris, and a thin girl climbed out of it before two others, a man and a woman, emerged alive.
"I had no time thinking about whether or not I could have died there helping others. Time is limited for saving lives after an earthquake," she said.
China had 142 peace-keeping police officers in Haiti before the quake. Four of the Chinese mission and the other four were sent by the Chinese authorities on a temporary mission were killed in the quake.
Their bodies arrived in the Chinese capital of Beijing on Tuesday morning on a chartered flight.
So far, there have been no exact figures about casualties from the earthquake, but Haitian officials estimated that the final death toll could reach between 100,000 and 200,000.
