Four-storey fall…Survivor recalls near death experience

Jul 01, 2014 Sports

“All I know is that when I was coming down, I feel something catch me and then put me gently on the ground,” Fizul Habiban, the carpenter who miraculously survived a fall from a four-storey building last month, recalled.

Habiban and his family yesterday

As he sat beside his wife, Sita and two children, Joel and Naomi, on a chair yesterday at his Tank Street, Grove, East Bank Demerara home, the 40-year-old carpenter thanked God for saving his life.
He said that although he did not see any faces, he is convinced that God caught him and then put him to lie on the ground.
“I know it was God. My wife goes to church and she prays for me and it is her prayers that saved me from death,” Habiban said with a smile on his face. “I felt His hands holding me. I fell into something soft.”
Recalling what happened on that day, May 14, last, the survivor said that he was on the fourth storey of a building located at the corner of East and New Market Streets, Georgetown when he fell.
“I was tying steel at the end of the building and when I finished, I just fan my hand and it touched on the electrical wire that run from the utility pole to the building and I get shock and like the current pitched me off the building,” the father of two recalled.
According to Habiban, while he was falling off from the building, death was never in his thoughts. “I couldn’t scream. I know I was falling down but I was calm. I even know when the guys picked me up from the ground and took me to the hospital and everything.”
Minutes after the carpenter was rushed to the hospital, his colleagues said, “All of a sudden he start swaying and before we coulda rush to him he fall off from the top floor and onto the concrete ground, and he just stay there. We thought he de dead but when we rush down he raise up and start crying out for his belly.”
When Habiban fell from the building, he was not wearing any protective gear. While a patient at the hospital, he had repeatedly told this newspaper that he will love his wife more.
When asked yesterday about the statement he made, he said, “If it wasn’t for my wife, I wouldn’t have been here today. Her prayers have me here. She does always ask me to go church. She does press my clothes to go and I don’t go.”
Although Habiban, the lone breadwinner for his family, escaped with minor injuries, doctor advised him to rest for six months. He did a surgery on his hand last Friday to remove a damaged bone.
“I can’t really do anything. I am home and I have my wife and two children to maintain and it hurts to know I cannot provide for them. The owner for the building does give me a li’l raise every week but the question is whether he is going to give me money for the full six months,” the survivor said.
He explained that the accident was a major setback for him and his family. “I recently get a house lot so I was trying to do extra work to get some money to start build my own house when this happened. Now everything is at a standstill.”
The 40-year-old is currently living in the lower flat of a two-storey building with his family. The house is owned by his relative.
When Kaieteur News did the interview late yesterday, Habiban’s home had no electricity.
The father of two is pleading with the public for financial assistance of any sort.

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