Bangladeshi officials have given the first account of how a "miracle" survivor pulled from a collapsed building managed to emerge alive 17 days after the disaster, and hailed her indomitable spirit.
Reshma Begum, 18, a seamstress who was dug out from rubble of the garment factory on Friday, drank rainwater and had found lunch boxes of co-workers "from which she got some food", Major General Chowdhury Hassan Suhrawardy said.
"She has made history. She is an example not only for Bangladesh but also for the world," General Suhrawardy said as the death toll from the impoverished nation's worst industrial accident hit 1110 yesterday.
The painfully thin woman, who TV footage showed smiling shyly from her hospital intensive-care bed, had been "trapped in a place spacious enough for her to crawl comfortably", said General Suhrawardy, who has headed the giant relief effort.
Ms Begum was wearing a fresh dress when she was rescued, taken from a box of clothes she found, and had cut her hair with a pair of scissors "because it is so hot under the rubble", he said. But "she still can't sleep well. She gets frightened every now and then and the nurse has to hold her hand to comfort her".
Colonel Azizur Rahman, who leads the medical team looking after Ms Begum, said she had suffered "some metabolical changes" due to malnutrition and her kidney function level dropped to 40 per cent.
"She is improving," and was now eating rice and semi-solid food, he added.
Rescuers found her after long abandoning hope of locating more survivors. They were stunned to hear a woman's voice calling for help.
She was freed in a 45-minute operation aired live on television and watched by crowds at the scene.
"We first saw a pipe moving. We removed some gravel and concrete. We found her standing," said Major Moazzem, who goes by one name.
"She told us: 'My name is Reshma, please save me, please save me, brother'," Jamil Ahmed, another rescuer, recounted.
She later told Somoy TV in an interview: "I called but nobody heard me. I heard noises, but nobody listened to me."
Her family, from a remote northern village, called her survival a miracle. "We had lost all hope of finding her alive. We visited every hospital . . . the mortuaries and checked every body," said her brother, Zahidul Islam.
General Suhrawardy said the search for bodies would continue until the last missing person was accounted for.
Sunday 12 May 2013
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/lunch-boxes-of-the-dead-key-to-survival-in-factory-hell/story-e6frg6so-1226640661587
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