A little more than 30 minutes after arriving in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Lovell and Virginia Cary were sitting inside a sport utility vehicle, heading for their hotel.
In the front passenger seat was Bishop Elysee Joseph, leading pastor of the Church of God in Port-au-Prince, who had met them at the airport. The Carys, both 81, and Lloyd Frazier, 74, all from Cleveland, Tenn., were in the back.
As traffic ahead of them slowed, Mr. Cary gazed out the right-hand window.
"I looked up and saw the wall, there was a little piece protruding out, and I just thought it would be awful if it fell on top of us," recalled Mr. Cary, former general director of World Missions, sitting in his Cleveland, Tenn., home.
Seconds later, the vehicle's roof smashed down on them, forcing them to sit practically on the floor.
Around them, the 7.0-magnitude earthquake had destroyed many buildings, leaving rubble and crumbling walls behind.
They couldn't open the SUV's doors from inside, couldn't move a finger until someone on the outside -- an "angel," as Mr. Cary describes it -- opened the door on Mrs. Cary's left side.
She got out feet first, followed by Mr. Cary and finally by Mr. Frazier. The driver also made it out, but Bishop Joseph didn't.
Within the hour, help from the Church of God arrived and Mr. Frazier, who speaks fluent Creole, worked with several men to remove the rubble and rocks that had fallen on the vehicle.
"I then saw (Bishop Joseph's) left hand dangling across the driver's seat. I went towards it, grabbed it. It felt limp and a little bit cooler," Mr. Frazier said softly.
"I think he must have died almost immediately," added Mrs. Cary. "I don't remember hearing him say a word."
worried relatives
At 3:50 p.m. on Jan. 12 the group of three missionaries -- the Carys and Mr. Frazier -- had arrived at the airport in Port-au-Prince in anticipation of the Haitian National Convention, an international church conference.
They were greeted by Bishop Joseph, who welcomed them with a big smile and even offered to carry their luggage.
At 4:25 p.m., the three got into the vehicle and joined the driver and another Haitian man, who rode in the back. They were heading to a hotel in Petionville, an area in Port-au-Prince, when the earthquake hit.
Immediately after they climbed out of the ruined SUV, the driver's cell phone rang. On the line was a pastor in New York, calling to check in. Mr. Frazier gave his wife's phone number to the pastor, asking him to let her know that they were alive.
Edna Frazier, back in Cleveland, had spent all morning sewing sashes for children at her church when she received a call from a woman she knew in Miami, who was asking about the Haitian earthquake. The sashes sat on the sewing machine for the next four days.
She spent hours calling all the numbers she had, even going back to people she knew from the 22 years she and her husband lived in Haiti, leaving in 2004.
Then she got the call from the New York pastor.
"I felt relieved when the pastor from New York called me to say they had survived," she said.
But at the same time, she knew enough about Haiti to realize that they were in trouble if they didn't have access to water.
Back in Port-au-Prince, Mrs. Cary -- with fractures in her sternum and two ribs -- wove a path through the debris, held on one side by her husband and on the other by a Haitian man.
Mr. Frazier walked in front of them, pulling their four pieces of luggage.
They walked for more than an hour until Mrs. Cary couldn't take it anymore and sat down in the middle of the road. Schoolchildren dressed in white shirts and dark pants and skirts ran past them, trying to get back to their homes to see if their families were alive.
Mrs. Cary fainted. She was exhausted, in pain and covered in dirt and sweat.
Eventually, she managed to get up and they walked the rest of the way to the Church of God compound, but because of the aftershocks that night they slept inside a "tap tap," one of the multicolored trucks that act like taxis in Port-au-Prince. Mr. Frazier slept in the front seat while a Haitian woman found a piece of foam for the Carys to sleep on.
The night was filled with the sounds of the people praying and singing such hymns as "Love to the Lord" as they tried to sleep out in the open.
The following day, some Haitian women scrambled to find pasta and improvised a red sauce and passion fruit juice to feed the Carys and Mr. Frazier.
"They thought of us in the midst of all the difficulties and chaos," said Mr. Cary, pausing for a couple of seconds, controlling tears.
The Cleveland missionaries went for a couple of days with almost no liquid except for small plastic bags of water they punctured with a pocket knife and poured into small cups.
"your only hope"
On Thursday, two days after the earthquake, they were driven to the Port-au-Prince airport, hoping to catch a flight to the Dominican Republic.
In 90-degree temperatures, they waited and waited, sometimes standing, other times using their luggage as chairs. Hundreds of people crowded around a U.S. consulate official, trying to get on the list to be evacuated.
"I'm your only hope; if you don't listen to me you won't go," the man yelled at the pushing and shoving group, said Mr. Frazier.
While Mr. Frazier tried to get all their names on the list, the Carys waited, keeping out of the desperate crowd. Struggling in the heat, Mrs. Cary fainted and was picked up by a Haitian man, who carried her to the airport's entrance, a moment caught by CNN cameras.
Meanwhile, Mr. Frazier was still outside when he fainted as well, overcome by exhaustion and dehydration.
After six hours of waiting and looking for each other, the Carys and Mr. Frazier finally regrouped and boarded the plane. At exactly 4:15 p.m., the plane rose from the runway, a moment Mr. Cary said he'll never forget.
At 3:18 p.m. Saturday, the three left the Dominican Republic on a three-hour Delta flight to Atlanta.
Mr. Cary said he had mixed feelings about returning to the United States.
"I thought of all the Haitian people with no food, no water, without medical care," Mr. Cary said, his eyes watering and his throat constricting. "I thought, 'I stand here with the potential of getting out but they can't, they have to stay and live with the consequences of this earthquake.'"
"I don't think I'll live long enough to see it restored."
-- Virginia Cary, about the destruction in Haiti