Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Love and Survival

In these dark days, life still contrives to create moments straight out of feel-good movies, as it did this week in Haiti and has been doing over the past year in North Carolina.

Monday's PBS Online News Hour led off with a riveting drama from Port-au-Prince of Janette Samfour, a bank worker trapped in rubble for six days, suddenly being uncovered in view of her husband Roger, who had been hovering and praying at the site all that time.

As she was being extracted from the dangerous debris, she gave rescuers, fire fighters from Los Angeles, a message for her husband: "Even if I die, I love you so much. Don't forget it."

Janette Samfour emerged with broken fingers but otherwise unharmed to be reunited with Roger.

A different love-and-survival story is told by CNN about Laura Zych and Ben Bostic, passengers on Flight 1549 that crash-landed safely in the East River of Manhattan last January.

It was only months later at a reunion of survivors that they finally met, and Bostic confessed, "I was checking you out on the plane."

Their relationship, Zych now says, is a "positive outcome" from that day.

"We kind of pick each other up if we start to slip," he says. "What's better than smiling and laughing and love?"

Living to tell the world about it.

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