RUSSELLVILLE — Christina Julme’s friends and family believed she was dead.
Julme, an Arkansas Tech University graduate student, was buried under a mountain of rubble in the 2010 Haiti earthquake. She was trapped for two days in a classroom that had been demolished by a catastrophic 7.0-magnitude earthquake.
Her Facebook wall was full of messages from friends and loved ones that said, “RIP Christina.”
There were more than 70 students in her classroom that day, and only five survived. Of those five, Julme said, she is the only one who isn’t missing any limbs. She somehow made it out with few physical scars.
Julme arrived at Arkansas Tech in Russellville about a month ago, thanks to a Fulbright scholarship that she competed with 300 others for in a year-long process.
She said she is the first of her five siblings to have received a bachelor’s degree and is pursuing a master’s degree in multimedia journalism. Julme said she hopes to use her knowledge and degree to help empower the young women of Haiti.
“I think journalism will be the tool to help me tell stories that will impact young women’s lives, in Haiti, especially, but in the rest of the world also,” she said.
The earthquake was devastating for the impoverished country of Haiti — 3.5 million people were affected by the quake, with more than 300,000 injured, 105,000 houses destroyed and 4,000 schools demolished, according to www.dec.org.uk.
According to an article in the Columbia Journalism Review at www.cjr.org, the earthquake claimed the lives of 316,000 people, the Haitian government reported at one point, although estimates of the number of dead varied widely and might have been much less than that.
“It felt more like 3 million,” Julme said as she recalled walking the streets and seeing miles of dead bodies while she helped look for trapped survivors.
She could barely walk when she began searching for other survivors two days after being found, she said.
While searching for survivors, she came across the United Nations base in Haiti, where a large group of people were outside, hoping to find jobs.
Julme said a man working there told her the base needed six journalists. A security guard tried to deny her access because she didn’t have any identification, but another man argued to let her in, she said, and Julme got one of those jobs, even though she had completed only two years of undergraduate studies.
Her initial job at the U.N. base was to pass out numbers to people and explain where they could get food and water, she said. Another employee mentioned that Julme had a good voice for radio. Her supervisor knew Julme’s situation and vowed to help her learn the skills needed to work in radio, Julme said.
“She taught me everything I know about radio. I can’t even believe that,” Julme said about her supervisor.
Even though the work was hard at the U.N. in Haiti, working in radio helped Julme deal with the trauma she had experienced.
“It was therapy at the same time,” she said. She eventually got her own radio show and, in the process, helped people to discover African music.
“Music saved my life,” Julme said. “It helped me get all of the stuff out of my head.”
She started as an entry-level employee and was upgraded to public-information assistant after two years and continued to work there another four before going to study at Arkansas Tech.
All of her siblings went to high school, but Julme’s aunt had put her in a different nonprofit school in Haiti that was started by Americans for academically talented students. Julme learned to speak English there, and that’s what paved the way for her to receive the Fulbright scholarship.
In the six years since the earthquake, Julme has been working on healing, but she said it hasn’t been easy.
Two years ago, on the anniversary of the earthquake, Julme said, she left her house in Haiti to get some food. She was walking along a street and heard “We Are the World,” the song that was remade and re-recorded for Haiti shortly after the earthquake.
Suddenly, everything went black, she said, and when she woke up, she was in a hospital.
“The only thing I remember [was that] I was not able to breathe,” Julme said. “It was the same feeling I had when I was conscious under the rubble.”
She said the song took her back to when she was trapped and passing in and out of consciousness. Julme said she couldn’t see the other students, but she could hear them talking.
As the students died around her, she heard less and less talking until there was complete silence, she said.
When she woke up after the experience on the anniversary of the event, her mother told her that two women, who thought Julme had been beaten, found her and took her to the hospital.
Julme said she is still healing.
“Sometimes, it’s like I am another person. I love life. I love like doing fun stuff, but sometimes it feels so heavy that I am just down — completely down,” Julme said.
Julme said she still thinks about the students who were buried with her that day. Many of them had messages they wanted her to deliver to their parents if she made it out.
Her ex-boyfriend was also a survivor of the earthquake. Julme said she felt like “he lost his soul with the earthquake.” He lost his only brother and his best friend that day, she said.
Now, Julme said, she wants to focus her attention on empowering the young women of Haiti and around the world.
Young women, especially in Haiti, are too concerned with superficial beauty standards set by society and believe they have to rely on men to survive or move forward in life, she said.
Julme has created a movement and a website, belneges.com, that focus on teaching women how to make themselves feel beautiful by their own definitions.
Belneges means “beautiful women” in Creole. Julme started the movement in 2012 with the tag line “Beautiful women, but you define your own beauty.”
The website features articles on building self-esteem, natural hair care, wellness and beauty.
Julme has created several events and retreats for young women in Haiti and said she wants to help the project grow even more when she returns to Haiti after she completes her master’s degree.
“I always consider myself the luckiest girl in the world; you have no idea. I came from the poorest family,” she said, tearfully. “It will take time to heal, but I am a blessed girl. Life can be so tough, but you know at the same time, human beings have that power. If you fight enough, if you go deeper and deeper, you can find so much strength.”