The world's attention has been drawn to a collapsed school in Mexico City and the desperate attempt to rescue a 12-year-old girl. But late this afternoon, there are reports that all the children have been accounted for, but that one person may still be alive inside the school.
Among the two hundred or more victims of Tuesday's powerful quake in Mexico, this one voice has become a beacon of hope.
For an Ottawa woman, a Mexican native and a mother, she is the driving force behind a fundraiser to help the very organization spearheading the rescue attempt.
On the ground in Mexico City, rescue teams ask for silence and the enormous crowd instantly responds. There are faint cries for help under this mound of debris that was once a school.
“There's a little girl, she says her name is Frieda and that there's two more children near her,” says one volunteer near the site of the collapsed school.
The world's attention has focused on this one corner of Mexico City, despite the fact that more than 40 other buildings in the country's capital have collapsed like a flimsy house of cards.
But late this afternoon, Mexico’s sub-secretary of Navy said it appears that the children had been accounted for and are either in hospitals, at home or dead. The voice, they believe, may be that of an adult.
Student Luis Carlos says he has no idea how he got out. In 30 seconds, he says, his school was down, his best friend and little sister dead.
45-hundred kilometres away in Ottawa, Karla Briones, who was born in Mexico, still has family there andis raising a family here, watches and wishes she were there.
“It’s such a frustrating feeling not to be with my people and my country,” Briones says, “and being part of a human chain moving debris.”
So instead, she is organizing a fundraiser this Sunday in Ottawa at the Shanghai Restaurant between 6 and 10 p.m. Money raised will help a rescue group on the ground in Mexico called Los Topos de Mexico. With their rescue dogs, they go where no one else will, searching for victims trapped under debris.
“I'd still like to be there to comfort the moms that are having to go through this,” she says, “but if this is what I can do through thousands of kilometers away, then so be it.”
This is Mexico's deadliest earthquake since 1985, killing hundreds and leaving many more homeless.
One woman clutches a photo of her 24-year-old, buried beneath 6 floors of rubble in his office.
She says, “My son has been buried for hours, no one will tell me a thing."
The funerals have already started for those who didn't make it out alive. But hope for those still beneath the rubble that perhaps they will.
