Staff Writer

Salvent “Salvy” Kesnor can see Haiti from his Biddeford apartment, where he paints vibrant images of his homeland from memory.

Kesnor, 26, hasn’t been home for more than a year, when he was rescued from beneath a crumbled building, trapped in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince.

Kesnor lay pinned beneath the rubble for four days before he was found and taken to a hospital in Port-au-Prince. He was briefly treated at the hospital, but was unable to afford further care for his serious spinal injuries.

“How Salvy made it to us is the story of a million people,” said Pam Lee, a Cape Porpoise resident who, with the help of many others, brought Kesnor to the United States to receive treatment for his injuries.

Kesnor’s good friend, Gabidson Boisrond, grew up in Haiti and came to the United States two years ago to marry Lee’s daughter, Erin. Lee had spoken with Kesnor a few times over the phone but had never met him in person.

When Lee learned of Kesnor’s injuries and his inability to receive treatment she began calling people in Maine and across the country, including Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree.

“It was an incredible miracle,” Lee said. “I was there fielding calls and sending out calls to all these people who were stepping in and doing something wonderful. If not for a lot of people we would not have gotten him through,” Lee said.

Those people included a U.S. Special Forces officer who brought Kesnor to the U.S.S Comfort, a Navy medical ship where a surgeon operated on his top two vertebrae that had been fractured; a spinal cord nurse from Maine Medical Center who connected Lee and Kesnor to the Shepherd Center, a well-known spinal chord rehabilitation center in Atlanta, Ga.; and Boisrond’s brother James who traveled with Kesnor from Haiti as his translator.

“We knew we had to get him help,” Lee said. “Before the earthquake, medical care in Haiti was minimal at best, and after the earthquake there was no care available for someone with injuries like Salvy’s. Salvy’s breathing was so affected and if he hadn’t had surgery his fractured vertebrae would have become completely torn. There would have been no hope.”

“Before my surgery my doctor said he didn’t think I’d be able to walk again but that he’d do anything he could to try to save my life. I might have become completely paralyzed,” Kesnor said.

The surgeon took part of Kesnor’s hip bone to repair his vertebrae, Lee said, and although “incredibly dangerous” the surgery was a success.

Kesnor stayed at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta for six weeks after his surgery and began intensive therapy to regain movement in his neck and learn to walk again.

“Day after day, month after month, year after year I’ll be getting better,” Kesnor said. He still can’t squeeze his hands tightly, turn his neck well or maintain enough balance to run.

Doctors at the Shepherd Center provided Kesnor therapeutic exercises and one more challenge: They encouraged him to start painting again and even provided paint, canvas and an easel.

Kesnor had begun painting 10 years ago when he was 16 to provide for himself and his siblings. He sold the scenes, painted in acrylic on canvas, to tourists and soldiers in a friend’s shop in Haiti. He earned enough to live as a painter until 2006 when he was forced to move from the north to Port-au-Prince and work in construction.

Kesnor began painting scenes of Haiti from memory during his rehabilitation and continued to paint when he moved in with Lee in Cape Porpoise.

“When you’re used to something and then you have a problem, they like you to go back to that, to do that,” Kesnor said.

“It took Salvy a while to get back into (painting). In the beginning his hands didn’t work properly and they may never be 100 percent. But it’s incredible to me when I look at it. It’s not only rehab for his hands but it’s an emotional thing. It gets him back in touch with who he was,” Lee said

Last month Kesnor sent two recent paintings to the surgeon who repaired his spine, a promise he made while aboard the U.S.S. Comfort.

“When he saw my paintings he cried,” Kesnor said. “ He cried because he used to give me a 5 percent chance of staying paralyzed and now he sees what I’m doing again.”

In response, the doctor sent him a box of paints and tools with the message “to keep painting.”

“Salvy has been through more in a year than most people could even imagine,” Lee said. “And a I see a change in his paintings from before the earthquake, to right after and to now. The older paintings were more generic, still very good but not as colorful or alive. Then for a while they were very dark when he was going through a lot of emotional stuff. Now you see this life, color and movement in his paintings.”

 “I paint scenes that are memories. I like to paint beaches and skies. I like how, sometimes, when it’s just right I can see faces in the clouds,” Kesnor said.

Now, living in a Biddeford apartment with Gabidson Boisrond’s brother, James, Kesnor takes adult education classes while he completes routine doctor checkups.

While Kesnor is currently not making a living from his painting, art remains his emotional outlet.

“It’s what I do when I’m mad or I’m sad or I’m happy. There’s no other way to express those things exactly like painting,” he said.

Kesnor saideven though he misses home and his family he does not want to move back to Haiti.

“I really want to go back home to visit friends but for me living there, it still is not safe for me. Others may feel like they can, but I’m the one that endured it,” he said.

“It’s a bad souvenir of the past,” Kesnor said of the earthquake. “I’ll never forget that.”

 “I cannot count how many times I thought I was dead. I can’t say how it is when you have to stay somewhere and you cannot move, you cannot breathe very well. I was lying there face down — I just had to pray, pray, pray,” Kesnor said.

Kesnor said he hopes to travel in Maine and find more nature to paint.

“I paint Haiti because it’s beautiful,” he said. “So far I don’t know Biddeford or Maine well enough to paint them.”

Last week, several of Salvy’s paintings hung in Quest Fitness Center in Kennebunk, where he has continued his rehabilitation and exercises.

Kesnor’s artwork sets a “beautiful example” for many people who come into Quest, said managing partner Richard Evans.

“You meet a lot of people in this line of work with physical and health issues who get down over it. For Salvy, he took charge and he did it and many of us will never have to work as hard as he has had to work in the last year. He, and all his work, are inspiring,” Evans said.

Staff Writer Rachel H. Goldman can be 282-4337, ext. 233.