Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 25, 1994 TAG: 9401250070
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE DREYFOUS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
Not a big wall, or a mean wall. Just several feet of salmon-colored cinder block and mortar, the kind that lines many Los Angeles lots and separates many neighbors. But not the Kims and the Yafis. Not since the quake.
The wall fell down, and out of the rubble these two separate families built something much better - one.
"Before it's just `Hello. How are you?' Now is different. We're like a family now," said Jeong-seon Kim, smiling at the Yafis as they smiled back from the other side of the toppled wall. "We were scared. We didn't know what I can do, but they help us a lot."
The families are helping each other while camping behind what's left of their houses, peering in through glass sliding doors on shards of their everyday lives: mounds of cookware, books and condiment bottles strewn on their respective floors, a pile of the Kim boys' baseball cards here, a glimpse of the Yafis' broken dining room table there.
Jeong-seon Kim and her husband, Jae-bock, natives of South Korea, have shared their camp stove with the Yafis. When an inspector visited Fawaz Yafi and his wife, Jacky, natives of Lebanon, they made sure his next stop was the Kims' place.
"Nature said don't have no more borders. Take down the borders and make one world," Jacky said, her eyes sunken with fatigue. They've seen too much sadness in Lebanon's slow death and taken in too many miles over 17 years of searching for home.
She and Fawaz, a multilingual singer who has performed around the world, finally found it here, in golden California. "We will start over. It's not the first time in our life," Jacky said. "In America, we're fine. Our damage is from God, not people, like in Lebanon."
Unlike most area residents, the Yafis and Kims were already stirring in the pre-dawn darkness when the earth started moving Jan. 17.
At the Kims' house, the family was preparing to join other Assembly of God worshipers for 5:30 a.m. weekday services. Jeong-seon and Jae-bock, who runs an auto repair shop, had just awakened. Her mother was already down in the kitchen, making tea. Her father had just risen from bed in the room he shares with his grandsons.
The house began to shake. The plaster gave way first, then bricks crashed down on the bed where only minutes before Jeong-seon's father had been sleeping. Across the room, the ceiling above her sons' bunkbed never so much as cracked. The family scrambled downstairs, all of them running barefoot through broken glass. None was cut.
It was God who saw them to safety, the Kims said.
Next door, Jacky stood wrapped in a damp towel. When she was dressed for her shift at a convenience store, Fawaz would give her a ride. Their teen-age daughter was asleep down the hall. Upstairs, their son and Jacky's 69-year-old mother were in one room, her sister and brother-in-law in the other.
The house began to tremble. As Jacky grabbed for a robe, she heard 30 years of accumulated treasures, crystal brought halfway around the world, crashing. Like the Kims, they fled onto Balboa Boulevard.
Amid the panic and flight, unnoticed, the wall fell down.
The smell of gas filled the air. A broken water main unleashed a stream so swift that it swept up a car. A mighty blast erupted into a fire two blocks away.
"I thought we be finished," Jeong-seon said, sniffling from a cold the whole family has caught while sleeping outdoors.
"I was so scared," Jacky's mother added. "But we are safe."
Everyone agrees it's a shame that it took disaster to bring them together.
But someday, weeks or months from now, when the Yafis have hauled their last garbage can full of shattered glass to the curb and the Kims have replaced their chimney and secured the roof, the inevitable will happen.
The wall will go up again.
"There is a saying I know: In disaster maybe you meet strangers and let love flow," Fawaz said. "The wall doesn't matter. We know each other now. Whether it's up or down, we are family."
Keywords:
INFOLINE
by CNB