LA GUAIRA, VENEZUELA — Juan Zapata had just eaten dinner in his fifth-floor apartment overlooking the Caribbean and was about to take a shower when he was thrown across the room by the force of the twin earthquakes that ripped across Venezuela’s coast 10 days ago. He spent two days and seven hours trapped in the rubble, wedged between two pieces of rebar, before civilian rescuers pulled him out. “When they were rescuing me I said, ‘I’m on the fifth floor’ and they told me, ‘no, you’re in the lower basement.’ I couldn’t believe what had happened to me,” Zapata said, as he stood next to his cot in a field hospital in La Guaira state run by disaster relief group Samaritan’s Purse. Zapata was initially treated at the public hospital in La Guaira, the site hardest hit by the quakes, and came to the field hospital after visiting his building, Costa Brava, and finding it destroyed. He is recovering from several fractured ribs, as well as serious cuts and scrapes. His lower legs are bandaged and it still hurts to breathe. “All my material things were lost, but God has given me health,” he said.
