By 4:54 pm two tectonic plates had slipped just enough to ensure that now, a month later, he lives in a crude tent and is forced to trawl the capital every day to find enough food to survive.

For the 27-year-old, January 12 began as normal. Most of the day was spent at school teaching his 10 to 12-year old pupils French.

But at the end of the school day he decided to do something he told his pupils never to do: he played truant.

Tired and not wanting to make the hour-long commute to the State University in Port-au-Prince, where he is learning English, Wismay decided to jump in a collective taxi -- known locally as a tap-tap -- and head home.

"Then the vehicle started to shake," he remembered. "At the time I didn't know it was an earthquake.

"I thought it was a problem with the tap-tap. I started to ask what was going on, asking the driver, 'What are you doing?'

"But when I saw the damaged houses, I knew it was an earthquake."

Panicked, he frantically rang friends to see if they were okay. "We started to call, 'Where are you! Where are you! Where are you!" he said.

Luckily the 11 family members he lives with, including his aunt and uncle, were okay.

The house itself was not. Although it saw relatively minor damage -- a crack here, a collapsed interior wall there -- it was enough to scare the family into sleeping outdoors.

"The first night I slept out in the open," he said.

When the magnitude of the disaster began to set in, "we could not eat anything," he said.

The next morning brought fresh fears. "I thought the country was heading for chaos, I saw all the houses broken, even the presidential palace. I heard nothing from the government.

"I was really worried. I thought there would be violence, the prison was wide open, all the prisoners were out."

To compound the problems, Wismay's school was also destroyed, and with it his job.

But he still considered himself lucky. His university was badly damaged, with many people killed inside. He should have been there.

And his priority was still not finding food, but finding his friends.

"I didn't know where Vladimir was, but I knew Martise would be at her house," he said of two childhood friends.

It was a search that would take 14 days, before he gave up.

On Wednesday morning, a day after the quake, he traveled into Port-au-Prince, to Martise Cajuste's house in the sprawling Delmas area of the city.

"She was at home," he said somberly, "she went to take her daughter from school and as she arrived to the house, it collapsed.

"They tried to get her out of the house, but they couldn't. Finally on Thursday morning they took her out.

"She died with her daughter," he said, "she was my friend for a long time, and now I've lost her."

The loss was compounded by the treatment of Martise's body. In the chaos the corpse was simply thrown away. Her daughter's body was not found.

For the moment Wismay and his family had enough food. They managed to buy coffee and bread with the money they carried with them at the time of the quake and Wismay quickly found supplies of water at a local church.

But inflated prices quickly ate into the cash. "The price increased instantly, it used to be three pieces of bread for five gourdes (12 US cents), after the earthquake it was one piece of bread for five gourdes."

By Saturday, the fourth day, the spare cash was gone. "I started to walk around," he said.

He carried his crumpled university enrollment papers and an expired driving license in the hope they would score him a job.

Any job will do: "I can be a driver, or I don't have a problem sweeping for someone, to clean someone's house, anything, I can do anything," he said.

But nothing turned up. Increasingly desperate he began to visit the homeless camps that have sprung up across Port-au-Prince, hoping the morning would bring a bag of rice from a well-intentioned foreigner.

He found food from the World Food Program and at a camp run by Doctors Without Borders.

But with a small build, he said: "it is not easy to find food, you have to fight. There are too many people -- it is not easy."

Now, he said, a month after the quake, things are getting harder.

"My problem is I have to pay the tap-tap to go to Port-au-Prince."

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