Young Haiti quake survivor is doing well

A little over a week ago, 5-year-old Monley Elize was gulping fruit juice and standing on two small shaky feet in a medical clinic here, the heralded survivor of eight days buried in the rubble of his home.

Since then, he’s been featured on CNN and he and his uncle also appeared on NBC. The initial report in The Times brought dozens of offers of help. Around Port-au-Prince, where Monley’s was a rare good-news story in a city devastated by the Jan. 12 earthquake, the pint-sized survivor is recognized on local buses, his uncle says.

On Friday, Monley was staying deep inside a sprawling tent city, where 12 people -- Monley, his two brothers, an uncle, aunt, cousins and other homeless relatives -- share a 15-by-15-foot patch of brown earth. For shade, they were using a flowered bedsheet stretched between scavenged wood planks. His aunt, Kazmita, was boiling rice for supper.

When the earthquake struck, Monley said, he tried to get out of his family’s ground-floor apartment, but he was blocked by a falling door. He squatted in a corner under a small metal table as the three-story building collapsed.

In the eight days that followed, the uncle, Gary Elize, and other relatives dug out the bodies of Monley’s parents. As they looked for Monley, they were convinced that he was dead.

Elize found the child’s leg and was shocked when it moved. Minutes later, Elize was holding the severely dehydrated child in his arms and running to the main road.

Passing by at the time was Neil Joyce, 54, a San Diego doctor with the Los Angeles-based relief agency International Medical Corps. Joyce put Monley and his uncle in the car and drove them to the agency’s clinic. Doctors and nurses treated Monley over several hours and discharged him that evening.

Last weekend, Monley and his uncle returned to the clinic, where nurses and doctors fussed over him. The nurse who originally treated him, Gabriella McAdoo, who works in the emergency room at Stanford University Medical Center, fed him ravioli from a can and pronounced him in excellent health.

Monley agreed. “I feel good,” he said.

As they were leaving, Elize pulled a reporter aside. “If you see that doctor who brought us to the hospital,” he said, “would you please tell him thank you.”

Elize, whose home also was destroyed, says he isn’t sure what the family will do. Sleeping in the city of displaced people has been difficult, and the family is awakened frequently by shouts and other noises.

“We don’t have a home anymore, and we don’t have anywhere to go,” he said.

Monley has an aunt, a nurse in Florida, who has been providing some help. In addition, he said, other tent city residents, touched by Monley’s remarkable story, have given some of their own meager food supplies to help the family.

A TV network offered to put Monley and his uncle in a hotel room for a night last weekend for its story, Elize said. But the boy and his uncle left after a few hours because Monley was worried about staying inside a building and he missed his cousins.

“He was eating an apple at the hotel and began crying,” Elize said. “I asked him what was wrong, and he said he wanted to give the rest of the apple to his cousins.”

Elize took Monley back to the tent city, where, on Friday, he was out playing with new friends.

scott.kraft@latimes.com