By Kelly Malone

Sask. mom reflects five years after Haiti earthquake

Jan 12, 2015 | 3:32 PM

Standing on the roof of an orphanage with the son she was finally adopting, Melanie Brundage watched as the world around her began to shake.

Five years ago, she was just outside Port-au-Prince in Haiti as a gigantic earthquake hit.

“We were traveling, expecting to sign court papers for Mike, our youngest son. We got there the day of the earthquake,”  Brundage said.

“It was the scariest thing that I’ve ever experienced obviously. You didn’t know what was happening.”

Brundage and her husband Melvin, had traveled from Nipawin to Haiti to finalize the adoption of the two-year-old boy. They were standing with a group of children on the top balcony of the orphanage when the walls and floors began to move.

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“It was so like an out of body experience… I’m like ‘what do I do?’ Someone next to me said ‘get out of the building,’” Brundage explained, adding she grabbed Mike and another child before running out to the street.

“The actual earthquake, you didn’t really understand what was going on and it was just confusing. What I found even scarier was the aftershocks because you knew what had happened, you knew the building you were in could fall down with the next aftershock.” 

People filled the streets to get out of the falling buildings, find their loved ones, and move towards the mountains where it would be safer. Images shared on the news the day of and the days following showed bodies in the streets surrounded by rubble.

The hardest part of the ordeal for the Brundage family was when they were told the adoption would have to be put on hold and they would be leaving the country without their son.

“It felt like the worst thing you can imagine and it’s still just awful to think about,” Brundage explained.

They were able to get a happy ending when their adoption was chosen as one of more than 100 cases approved for fast-tracking by the federal government. Two weeks after the earthquake, little Mike was in his parents arms in Canada.

“It was one of the scariest days of our lives but two weeks later Mikey came home and completed our family,” Brundage said.

“It’s mixed emotions that we feel then and now. Obviously the country was devastated and that’s a hard thing to think about but we got our miracle and Mikey came home, so it’s happy and sad.”

On the anniversary, Brundage said she is ready to sit down and talk about how their lives, and the lives of people still in Haiti were impacted by that fateful day.

“We talk about Haiti and all of that sort of stuff on a regular basis. For sure today there will be discussions around it,” Brundage said.

Mike’s older brother Ritchie was adopted from the same orphanage in 2006 and was in Canada during the ordeal, but Brundage said he still feels the impact.

“Our older son is more emotional because he was here and old enough to understand,” she said, adding that they’ve flourished in the supportive Nipawin community.

“Mike, he’s just worried about when he’s going to play hockey next.”

The 7.0 magnitude quake shook the capital or Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12, 2010. The Haitian government said the quake killed more than 300,000 people and left more than 1 million homeless in the impoverished country.

news@panow.com 

On Twitter: @princealbertnow