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CHAPEL HILL -- Eric Louis, hands and arms covered in bandages, his face and head burned and scarred, walked slowly into a press conference Friday at the N.C. Jaycee Burn Center looking so fragile no one breathed.
"Bonjour," he said in a deep, loud voice to the surprise of those gathered in the tiny room.
Louis, the most severely burned of the three patients from Haiti, clearly has a long way go, but the horrific details of how he survived with the help of his wife is a tale of courage amid strife, the indomitable human spirit and, above all, a love story.
Louis, 48, and his wife, Yvita, were living in a suburb of Port-au-Prince. As Louis rode home from work in a taxi, the driver stopped for gas. Just then the earthquake struck; the gas station exploded and the taxi caught fire and exploded.
He struggled to get out of the taxi, with searing burns on his hands, legs, head and face. All around, the buildings had crashed to the ground. As he stumbled around looking for a way to call his wife, he stepped over dead and dying people.
Finally, he found someone with a mobile phone and called his wife.
Through the translator, Yvita took over the story, telling how she made her way to a hospital, but when she arrived the doors were closed and locked. People stood outside yelling and screaming for help.
"Something told her to jump over a car, and from the top of the car, she could see what was going on inside," translator Lionel Giordani said. "She called her husband, and her husband answered."
The hospital, like many of the other medical centers, didn't have anyone there to provide medical treatment for patients like Louis. Yvita told of going to the locked door and banging on it, trying to get to her husband.
She raised such a fuss that the people inside let her take her husband out, and the two of them made their way home through the rubble, arriving there about 1 a.m.
But there wasn't much left of their home, so Yvita found a piece of plywood, where her husband lay for six days as she tended to his wounds.
"The skin was actually hanging down and she took some scissors and cut them," Giordani said.
"She never slept," the translator continued.
Finally a neighbor with a truck drove them to a hospital in the Dominican Republic, with the last leg of the journey made by cart after the truck broke down. From that hospital, Louis was transported to the burn center in North Carolina.
"It's God and his wife that kept him alive," Giordani translated for Louis.
"She would like to see if they could stay over here in the U.S.," he said. "She says she likes North Carolina, a lot."
