‘Mama, I don’t want to die’: 60 hours under Venezuelan earthquake rubble

While under the dining room table in total darkness, Astrid Arnaude told her daughter, Jade Hernández, that if death came before their rescue, they would meet again in another life. 

Eight-year-old Jade responded that they would come back as kittens — but she wanted to stay alive so she could celebrate her ninth birthday on July 15 and see her grandmother again, said Arnaude. 

They prayed to Buddha, the archangels, the universe and Saint John the Baptist. 

“We had deep conversations about spirituality and life,” said Arnaude, 35, a single mom. 

“[Jade] told me, ‘I don’t want to suffer, Mama. If we die, I don’t want that we suffer.’ And that was like the faith that maintained us, that allowed us to hold on through so much.”

June 24 is a statutory holiday in Venezuela that celebrates the prophet who baptized Jesus. It was also the day when two massive earthquakes devastated the coastal state of La Guaira, killing and injuring thousands of people and displacing thousands more, and buried Arnaude and her daughter alive.

The disaster overwhelmed Venezuelan authorities and, as the world responded, local citizens began organizing efforts to rescue their loved ones. One of Arnaude’s closest friends, Jade Macedo, marshalled a crew of friends and volunteers to search for her and her daughter. 

Macedo was told there was no hope, that death had taken everyone in Arnaude’s building. But she refused to stop.

In the dark

Because that Wednesday was a holiday, Arnaude and her daughter took it easy, watching movies and lounging around in their apartment on the third floor of an 11-storey building in the Caraballeda municipality of La Guaira.

They had moved into the unit with Arnaude’s mother in January after negotiating a good rent. It was near the Caribbean beachfront and the cries of the macaws filled their mornings during the two-block walk to Jade’s school. 

Arnaude said they went to get ice cream from a McDonald’s on the afternoon of the 24th. She was feeling a cold coming on, so back home, she put a kettle on the stove and began cutting limes for tea. Jade was close to her when an earthquake alert began blaring on her cellphone, telling her to hang on tight. 

“In my mind, I thought, this is going to be strong, this is going to be something,” said Arnaude, a visual artist. “I had never seen that alarm in my life.”

She said she opened the door of her apartment and saw that palm trees were beginning to sway. She rushed back inside, grabbed her daughter and dove beneath the dining room table. 

“The moment I got under the table, I hugged my daughter and in the next second, everything collapsed,” she said. 

Arnaude said she closed her eyes as everything shook; she felt as though they were falling and a loud crunching sound enveloped them. When she opened her eyes, the blackness remained.

For a moment, she felt panic that they would suffocate from the dust that exploded around them. 

“I was crying. [Jade] was crying, saying, ‘Mama, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.'”

Then, a tiny miracle.

“We felt a small breeze. An air current entered every few minutes,” she said. “And that gave us some strength, because we could breathe deeply.” 

Sending ‘telepathic messages’

In the moments after the earthquakes, Jade Macedo started messaging her closest friends, including Arnaude. Macedo was 40 kilometres south of Caraballeda, in the capital, Caracas, where the quakes had also cracked and toppled buildings in certain neighbourhoods.

Macedo, 35, a surfer and sculptor, began to worry when she received no response. She kept messaging around, including to Arnaude’s mother. Finally, a friend wrote to say she had chatted with Arnaude not long before the earth shook and entombed large swaths of La Guaira. 

“When we saw everything that was happening in La Guaira, that is when we started to get alarmed,” said Macedo. 

She began organizing search and rescue teams, collecting tools and preparing plans to head to La Guaira, where her uncle was also trapped in a collapsed apartment building in Playa Grande, a few kilometres west of Caraballeda.

“Knowing how things are in this country, and how things happen here, you have to do things for yourself,” said Macedo.

She headed for her uncle’s collapsed apartment on June 25 and was at Arnaude’s apartment by the morning of June 26, with a crew of friends and colleagues, tools in hand, ready to dig. 

Macedo said that a Mexican search and rescue team had inspected the building and determined there was no one alive inside. But Macedo felt they were wrong. She believed Arnaude — one of her best friends — and her daughter were still alive.

Macedo, a mother with a similarly aged daughter, shared a bond with eight-year-old Jade Hernández that went beyond their shared first name.

“I felt a strong connection with the girl. I felt like she was sending me telepathic messages,” said Macedo. “I told everyone that she was fine and that we would get her out without a scratch.”

Losing faith

Amid the rubble, there were screams all around Arnaude and her daughter in the dark — including the voice of a young boy from a nearby apartment saying his brother was dying and that his parents were already dead. 

“He was calling for help and … I tried to soothe the child, yelling to him to be calm, that they were going to get us out, that they would rescue us,” said Arnaude. “But the child became delirious and began saying things that no longer made sense.”

The boy would die waiting for rescue.

When an aftershock hit, Arnaude said she felt another pang of panic and heard more screams. 

Then calm. 

“I couldn’t hear anything,” said Arnaude. “I didn’t know if anyone was looking for us.”

Arnaude said she began to explore her immediate surroundings, going by feel, sifting through the strewn remains of their life. She found Jade’s backpack and used the notebooks inside to cover the floor in their small space beneath the table, which was now littered with bits of debris. She added padding with fabric scraps from a bag she had left on the table that afternoon. 

Her hands found the McDonald’s Happy Meal box Jade used to gather keepsakes. Her daughter remembered there was a whistle inside, given to her by an aunt the year before to use if they were ever caught in an earthquake. 

Arnaude also discovered a bag of sliced bread, but they had no water, and she worried the bread could stick to their throats. Jade started making little balls with it and eating them, but she and her mother only managed to eat half a slice.

“I didn’t find any water, nothing,” Arnaude said. 

“I decided to try my own urine, because I said, well, it’s the only liquid that I have and I can’t go without hydration, I can’t get dehydrated.”

She grabbed one of Jade’s toys, shaped like a little cup.

Drinking her urine “was disgusting and I suppressed the urge to vomit. But it worked, and in a few minutes, my saliva returned.” Arnaude also felt her strength return.

But Jade refused. She grew weak and slept more and more. 

“There was a moment when I lost faith, because I couldn’t hear anything,” Arnaude said. “But I couldn’t let my daughter know because she would also lose faith.” 

Soon there was light

Outside, Macedo was getting to work. She drew a layout of the apartment from memory, outlining where the kitchen sat, the hallways and bedrooms. The crew of volunteers determined the best entry point and got to work drilling and digging out an access tunnel into the collapsed building. 

First, they found items from Arnaude’s apartment and then her bedroom; the bed was pinned beneath a concrete structural slab. Macedo was the first to squeeze through a tunnel that eventually led to the fallen wall between Arnaude, Jade and freedom. 

“I cleared the tunnel with my hand to open up the space so someone who was larger could fit in and analyze how the wall fell, to attempt the rescue,” said Macedo. 

Once the tunnel was widened, a young Venezuelan army sergeant who had joined in the work entered the collapsed building.

Inside, Arnaude, who was weakening, said she began to hear faraway voices. One woman’s voice stood out. Arnaude kept focusing on it.

“She was saying, ‘No, the hallway is here, the apartment should be on this side.’ I felt something like hope. I shouted, but no one heard me.” 

A space of silence followed. 

She tried to orient her focus in the direction of the woman’s voice — but a young man’s voice suddenly pierced the darkness and drew her suddenly toward the final miracle.  

“The first thing he asked me was what floor I was on, what apartment and how many we were,” said Arnaude. 

Soon, there was light. 

Venezuelan search and rescue personnel brought Jade out first and then Arnaude, as they emerged to claps and cheers, according to video of the extraction. 

That was around 3 a.m. on June 27, nearly 60 hours after Arnaude and Jade dove under the table. 

Macedo said she has seen Arnaude in recent days, and “as we were touching and hugging, it was like … ‘Is this real?'”

Arnaude and Jade are now in a shelter in Caracas, along with Arnaude’s mother and brother, who also lost his home.

Arnaude said the rescue felt like being extracted from the womb.

“I was in the dark, in a small space, in almost a fetal position, because I was either kneeling or crouching and then, seeing light for the first time and I had to exit through a tunnel, head first,” she said.

“It was like the earth literally gave birth to my daughter and I … My daughter says, ‘Yes, Mama, we were born again.'”