Hair ties, nail scissors and hope: How a baby was born after Venezuela’s deadly earthquakes

MAIQUETIA (Venezuela), July 8 — When twin earthquakes rocked Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, 19-year-old Eliana Garcia ran for her life with her family.

At 38 weeks pregnant, she sought refuge on a baseball field with dozens of others fleeing buildings that were collapsing around them.

Then, she felt fluid trickling down her legs.

Doctors had already told the first-time mother she could not give birth naturally because of her narrow pelvis, and a caesarean section had been scheduled for a week later.

Instead, labour came early.

“I felt like I needed to pee. But I pushed and pushed, and when nothing came out, I understood that the baby was coming,” Garcia told AFP from a shelter.

Her family laid her on the only sheet they had managed to grab as they fled.

It was the early hours of June 25.

Barefoot and in the dark, her sister-in-law, Julia Di Giuseppe, ran through the devastated coastal city searching for help.

Around her, rescuers climbed over mountains of rubble searching for survivors trapped beneath collapsed buildings, while motorcycles weaved through debris left by the powerful quakes.

No water, no electricity

No one responded to Di Giuseppe’s pleas.

She returned to the baseball field just as Garcia began giving birth while aftershocks continued to shake the ground.

“I begged a paramedic who was searching for her family members in the ruins, and she started helping,” the 37-year-old said.

With no running water, no surgical gloves and only hand sanitiser, the paramedic delivered the baby under the glow of mobile phones that still had battery power.

Surrounded by strangers who briefly forgot their own grief, Garcia pushed.

When the baby emerged – a boy, to the family’s surprise after they had been expecting a girl – he was silent.

Then, as the crowd erupted in applause, he let out his first cry.

The next challenge was cutting the umbilical cord.

With no medical equipment available, “people started taking out their hair bands and we tied it at both ends, with a lot of alcohol,” Di Giuseppe recalled.

The cord was eventually cut with a pair of nail scissors.

Garcia, who is separated from the baby’s father, remembers little after that.

Her family carried her in their arms before transferring her onto a motorised garbage cart and later into an ambulance that took her to a public hospital.

Doctors, already overwhelmed by earthquake victims, treated her and her newborn.

The family was later moved to a public school serving as an emergency shelter in La Guaira, the region worst hit by the magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes that have left nearly 3,700 people dead, with thousands more still missing.

As Di Giuseppe watched Garcia breastfeed her son, she broke down in tears.

“We saved him, but we lost our two nieces,” she said.

The girls, aged 14 and 11, were found beneath the rubble of the apartment building where they had lived.

Crushed beneath tonnes of concrete, their father recognised them only by the silver bracelet the older girl wore.

The girls’ mother, who was Garcia’s sister, and a nephew remain missing.

Garcia had planned to name her baby Daniel Eduardo if it was a boy.

“But my sister always told me to name him Gael,” she sobbed.

“So, for her sake, I decided to name him Gael Jesus. It’s my way of having her here with me.” — AFP