Oranel Mettelus and his crew had just finished construction on a home in the wealthy enclave of Pétion-Ville in Port-au-Prince when the earth trembled and brought the structure crashing to the ground. His work collapsed around him, sparing his life but leaving him trapped.

Had Mettelus, then 23, been working masonry in another, less monied neighborhood, he might have died there. He slept amidst the wreckage until a bulldozer arrived the next day to clear rubble for those residents with connections.

His family was not so fortunate. After Mettelus was freed, he picked his way through the debris of his fallen city to reach his own home. It took him two days, instead of the usual hour. He found his house caved in, his parents, three sisters and three brothers dead inside. Mettelus and his one surviving brother, then 15, were alone in a broken city.

“I lived, but it was like a part of me died,” he says, ten years later and three hours away from the epicenter and its aching memories. “Everyone who helped and supported me was gone.”

Now, Mettelus is part of Haiti’s ongoing efforts to rebuild, working as a mason with WE Charity, a global nonprofit. He spends his days constructing paraseismic school buildings that will survive Mother Nature’s worst violence, and ten years ago, may have saved his loved ones.

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that shook the tiny Caribbean nation for 30 seconds on January 12, 2010 killed more than 200,000 and sentenced the country to a rebuilding effort that was rigged by poor governance and spotty aid distribution. Mettelus is among the 1.5 million Haitians who were displaced right after the disaster. Many left Port-au-Prince for rural areas, tiny villages whose populations suddenly ballooned beyond capacity, beyond roadblocks and collapsed bridges, farther than most aid supplies reached.

While aftershocks rippled across the country, nearly 100,000 people made their way north from the capital, walking or hitchhiking to safe ground. The world’s aid and efforts were focused on the epicenter, where the human toll was greatest. In the Central Plateau region, there was a different type of need.

WE Charity had been working in Haiti for a decade when the earthquake struck, and the organization zeroed in on its work in rural areas, setting up in Hinche, about three hours from the capital.

On the anniversary of the earthquake, Mettelus tells his story in Creole through a translator, about his decision to leave Port-au-Prince and travel with a friend who had also lost everything in the capital and wanted to reach family in Kabayi, a small village in Hinche region: “There was nothing left. We had to move through.”

When he first laid eyes on Kabayi, surveyed its dirt roads that lead to distant hills in Haiti’s only landlocked province, the young man who’d lost everything thought, “I could make something of this.”

Guerline Honore had the same thought and had left her home in Mirebalais, a town just outside of Port-of-Prince, for Hinche. She and Mettelus had known each other from back home, and met up again shortly after leaving. They were already in love, he says, and after losing everything, there was no reason left to deny it or to wait. The couple married and built a house with savings from Mettelus’s masonry work and the money made from dry goods Honore sold at market—rice, pasta and canned milk.

Mettelus picked up odd-jobs as a mason and started a family with his wife. When his first son, Michael, reached primary school, his classroom was crumbling. The school building was nearly 90 years old, one room, with decaying walls and without a roof. Though Kabayi wasn’t hit by the earthquake, the school’s condition after years of neglect made it looks like it was.

WE Charity set up operations in Hinche for this reason, to partner with remote communities burdened with the post-disaster population influx and poor infrastructure. The charity built classrooms, established school gardens, created hygiene and sanitation programming, income-opportunity groups and mobile medical clinics. In 2018, on a recommendation from the government, Kabayi partnered with WE Charity. The first project was to replace Michael’s dilapidated school.

The charity hires local builders to boost the economy. “Our approach is participatory. We recruit the strengths of the community,” says Fran-Dieu Napoléon, leading engineer and WE Charity’s Associate Country Director in Haiti. He’s been with the charity since 2010 and has built more than 70 classrooms. He says it’s critical to integrate displaced populations into their new communities in meaningful ways and hiring residents as workers is key.

“We know if the community participates in the construction, they feel ownership over it, which helps with the project’s longevity. We don’t discriminate between the displaced and the local. They all come together as one family.”

Napoléon teaches his local crew earthquake and hurricane proof engineering principles that they can then replicate in their own homes and community projects. He worked side by side with Mettelus, who mixed the concrete that forms the foundation under his children’s feet.

Mettelus tells his story sitting with his two sons, Michael is 6, and Lubens, 5. They practice the alphabet in their reinforced classroom, with its paracyclonic window design that funnels harsh winds through safely, its poured concrete beams at three levels and its foundation settled deeply into erosion-tested soil. Mettelus says he feels stable and secure. There is enough infrastructure here for him to stay. He won’t ever go back to Port-au-Prince. In the walls around him, each cinderblock was individually strength-tested—there are around 2,000 of them.

According to their father, Michael and Lubens will be professionals, doctors or engineers who learn beyond his own Grade 5 education and won’t struggle like he did. He walks them to school every day to be sure, even though the trip takes just a few minutes from their home. For now, Michael sings his ABC’s softly to himself in his classroom while Mettelus looks on proudly. Soon the brothers will have a sibling; Honore is pregnant with the couple’s third child.

As he looks back on that Tuesday ten years ago, Mettelus gets anxious. “Sometimes I lay at night and can’t sleep at all. I can’t stop thinking about it. If my Mom and Dad were still here, I wouldn’t have to figure it out on my own.”

He is cautiously optimistic about the future but knows it can be hard to predict.

“I’m not sure what tomorrow will bring,” he says. “My children are my hope.”