More than two weeks after the earthquake brought down her school - and a day after she was lifted from the ruins - Darlene Etienne was eating yogurt, talking and regaining her strength Thursday.
"We are very surprised at the fact that she is still alive," said Dr. Evelyne Lambert, who is caring for her on a French hospital ship offshore.
One who didn't seem surprised was the girl's mother, a poor rice-and-vegetable peddler.
"I never thought she was dead," Kerline Dorcant, 39, told The Associated Press. "I always thought she was alive."
Jerome Sales, ECPAD / AP
French military medical staff tend to earthquake survivor Darlene Etienne on Wednesday after the girl was pulled from a ruined school.
Why?
"It's God" hearing a mother's nonstop prayers, she said.
Added Darlene's brother, Preslin: "I think she has a special God."
The astonishing rescue of the high school student, by a French search team that refused to go home when others did, offered a moment of joy in this grieving city, where uncounted thousands were entombed in a landscape of broken and heaped-up concrete, wood and metal.
They're among an estimated 200,000 quake dead in Haiti, including 150,000 who Haitian officials say have been buried anonymously in mass graves.
The U.S. Army's bulldozers were digging into that rubble Thursday, knocking down shaky walls and beginning to clear away ruins in Port-au-Prince, where perhaps 90 percent of the buildings were destroyed or damaged in the Jan. 12 quake.
