PORT-AU-PRINCE: Mendji Bahina Sanon, just 11 years old, lay emaciated, her breathing laboured, fighting nightmares as she gradually came back to life yesterday after spending eight days buried under Haiti’s rubble.

At the foot of her bed in a French-run clinic in Haiti’s ravaged capital, Ernst Clerge tried to comfort her anguished child, who struggled against the terror of her dreams, crying out. “Mama is not in the hole, don’t leave me Mama,” the little girl said.

Her rescue is an amazing story of survival. “It truly is a miracle, she came back to life bit by bit,” said Dominique Jan, a surgeon working at a field hospital. On January 12, Sanon’s mother was on her way home from her job as a cleaning lady for the United Nations mission here when the earthquake began.

“I had left my five children at home. The two-story building had collapsed. I though they were all dead,” she said.

“My 21-year-old daughter appeared first and then, with the neighbours, we dug out two more children who had injuries to their feet.

“We recovered the lifeless body of my five-year-old son the next day,” she said. She continued to search for her missing daughter, looking for two days in vain.

Then, yesterday, she heard a neighbour cry out: “I heard your daughter, she called out.”

“I didn’t believe it, but I rushed, the neighbours dug, she was alive and they dug her out,” the grateful mother said.

“She told me she had prayed a lot and I thanked Jesus, we must have faith in Jesus,” she said, adding

out of her daughter’s earshot: “I haven’t told

her yet that her favourite little brother died.