KICKING AT THE DARKNESS by Shekhar Gothi

I have always loved the Bruce Cockburn song “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” especially the slower Barenaked Ladies version, with its haunting bass interlude. The line “Kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight” took on a whole new meaning when I was buried alive during the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

I deployed to Haiti in August 2009 as part of the Canadian military contingent in support of the United Nations stabilization mission. I was executive assistant to a Canadian colonel, who was military chief of staff for the UN mission and the third-highest military officer in the country.

The day of the quake, January 12, 2010, was like any other. I’d been in my office all afternoon. Around ten to five, I got up to get some fresh air.

We were on the ground floor of a six-storey build- ing atop a hill. Our office door was a sliding glass panel, which I closed behind me as I stepped into the hallway. That’s when everything started to shake. My vision blurred and my ears were pierced by a deafening roar. It’s hard to describe the violent and unbelievable power of an earthquake. The whole building and everything within it was thrown side to side. The glass doors instantly evaporated into a million shards and everything went dark.

A local Haitian man was walking past me at that moment. He jumped on my back—I’m not sure if he meant to or was just propelled that way—and clung on to me. Within seconds we were both completely buried in debris and chunks of concrete, some the size of bowling balls. Luckily, where we were, the building crumbled into many fragmented pieces; in other places, like the neighbouring offices, whole slabs came down and crushed people to death, including some of our clerks.

We found ourselves in complete darkness, strug- gling to breathe. Debris and soot covered everything. There was no oxygen or sound, no power. We were essentially entombed in a semi-standing position; the only noise was this man screaming in Creole.

Military training kicked in and I went into crisis management mode. I don’t know why, but “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” popped into my head. Not just symbolically—I actually kicked at the darkness so I could see daylight!

Time stood still. I may have been trapped for ten minutes or an hour, it was hard to tell. I got hit on the head by a lot of falling concrete, but didn’t lose consciousness, thank God.

I struggled toward the front door but the exit there was completely sealed off. My injuries prevented me from walking, so I crawled back through my office and my boss’s office. It was not easy; there were large steel filing cabinets squashed like pancakes every- where. Concrete and mangled rebar cut my arms and legs. Somehow I made it out to the balcony and threw myself off. And again I was lucky, as some people below caught me. I had a contusion on my head the size of a kiwi, which I was unaware of until someone pointed it out to me.

Six or seven hours later, I was put into a flatbed truck full of injured people and moved down to a makeshift casualty collection point near the airfield. That drive was an indescribable nightmare. I watched as the driver did his best to manoeuvre the massive truck around rubble and dead bodies in the darkness. That memory is forever burned into my mind.

The next morning I was medically evacuated on a UN transport helicopter to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. A few days later I was on a plane back to Canada and, after one week, I returned to Port-au-Prince to rejoin the recovery effort.

I am fortunate that the post-traumatic struggles have not debilitated me as much as they have some of my comrades. I still rely on music every day. When I was buried alive, the lyrics of Bruce Cockburn’s song gave me inspiration as I struggled: “One minute you’re waiting for the sky to fall / The next you’re dazzled by the beauty of it all.” And “These fragile bodies of touch and taste / This fragrant skin, this hair like lace / Spirits open to the thrust of grace / Never a breath you can afford to waste.”

When I think back on that fateful day, the lyric that resonates the loudest for me is “Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight / Got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.”

Lieutenant-Commander Shekhar Gothi is the innovation officer for Southern Ontario for Canadian Special Operations Forces Command (CANSOFCOM). He grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and now lives in Toronto.