It was like living in coffin: Haiti quake survivor

Port-au-Prince: For five days, Jens Kristensen felt like he was living in a coffin. Under the twisted mountain of rubble of the United Nations headquarters in Haiti, the aid worker was enclosed in a five-foot long space so dark that it made no difference if his eyes were open or closed.

And yet the 48-year-old Danish national somehow survived this ordeal, dehydrated and sore but with little more than a bruise on his upper arm and a scratch on his right hand when a search team from the United States rescued him on 17 January.

Three days after being rescued, Kristensen was back at work as a senior humanitarian officer coordinating the relief effort between the Department of Peacekeeping (DPKO), the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the outlying agencies.

"If you see the devastation in Haiti at the moment, it is enormous. I cannot just evacuate. I feel physically sore after five days on a concrete slab but mentally I am strong enough to do it. And certainly at a time when the country needs so much assistance," he said, his sentence cut off by the roar of an aid plane landing in Port-au-Prince.

Image: A body lies in the rubble as a vehicle from the U.S. Army of the 82nd Airborne Division drives by in Port-au-Prince, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2010. A 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti on Jan. 12, killing and injuring thousands and leaving many homeless.

Text: IBNS

Images: AP