Six-year old Pria Williams was only "a little scared." Her 13-year old sister Dawn was "not afraid." But the girls' father, Frank Williams, feared his family was gone for good when their Port-Au-Prince apartment collapsed in the 7.0 earthquake that rocked Haiti last week.
The family were in Haiti working for a humanitarian organization when the massive quake struck.
Yet somehow the girls, who were with their mom, June, huddled in an air pocket and survived. "I went from being the poorest person to the richest person in the world," said their Dad, a humanitarian aid worker who was at his offices at World Vision when the quake hit.
He walked 45-minutes in the dark and searched for his family by flashlight to no avail. It was the next morning he found them, huddling in a carport. In the hours before, Dawn had led her mom and sister out an opening in the rubble and to a treet, where they clung to safety until a neighbhor got the sheltered at the carport.
Six days later, the family is home in Stamford, recuperating, and attributing their survival to a miracle.
The kids are split, however, on whether to go back to Haiti.
"I'd like to," says eighth-grader Dawn. "There is so much need. So much work to be done." Her little sister, who won't soon forget the sound of "rumbly" rocks crashing down around her, put it this way: "I wanna be safer somewhere else. Like in Connecticut."
