Breast Milk Saves 16 Adrift At Sea

SABANA DE LA MAR, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC -- Lost at sea in a small boat, 16 people cheated death with a mother's milk.

Their throats were so dry that some could only spit blood. They could barely talk. That's when one passenger on the journey to Puerto Rico, Faustina Mercedes -- now called "Little Angel of the Sea" -- gave a unique gift. She shared the breast milk once reserved for her 1-year-old daughter back home.

The eight men and seven women took turns sucking on her breasts for just seconds a day, the small gulps coating their throats, wetting their dry lips. Finally, the currents pushed them back to shore on the 12th day. To feed herself, she had her sister, Elena Mercedes, suck on her breast then pass the milk on to her.

"That was God who put that idea in my head, and he just worked through me," said Faustina Mercedes, 31, while trying to calm her feverish daughter. She hasn't been able to breast-feed since the ordeal, but her gesture kept the 16 from becoming another statistic.

Many Dominicans end up lost at sea trying to travel about 100 miles across the shark-infested Mona Passage to a better life in Puerto Rico. The same week this group made it back to shore, another rickety boat heading to Puerto Rico sank off the coast of nearby Miches. About 45 people are believed to have drowned; their bodies are still missing.

Faustina Mercedes' group left Jan. 3, from a beach near the sleepy town of Sabana de la Mar. After paying $125 to $250 -- about two months' salary in a minimum-wage job -- the passengers got on the 24-foot handmade boat. They soon realized their compass was broken.

So in the area where the rough currents of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea clash, they were lost. Food and water was gone in three days. So was the gasoline. With every hour, dehydration got worse, and sores appeared on the passengers' bodies. The weakest lay on the bottom of the boat, almost delirious.

On the fifth day, shortly after praying, Faustina Mercedes told her sister to try her milk. She did, then used her mouth to give some of Faustina Mercedes' milk back to her. The sisters started feeling better immediately, so Faustina Mercedes offered milk to all.

"At that point, there was nothing more than prayer and my sister's breast," said Elena Mercedes, 24. Passenger Roberto Rodriguez, 35, used the edge of a nail clipper to cut an apple they found floating in the ocean into 16 pieces. The group also ate a half-rotten orange the choppy seas pushed toward them.

Waving to the many cruise and cargo ships they saw as they floated aimlessly proved pointless.

Then Santa Demorizzi, 24, saw what appeared to be land. With a makeshift sail and the currents, they got closer. At dawn on the 12th day, they pulled some wood from the sides of the boat and started rowing. They hit a rough patch with some reefs, and the waves gave them the final push that toppled them onto the beach.

"We did this because we had to. No one wants to leave their children behind," said Demorizzi, who worries about how to feed and educate her two children in a town where there is no work. "Now we're back here, thankful we're alive, but even more worried because we sold the few things we had so we could pay the fee to leave."

Since Oct. 1, the U.S. Border Patrol has apprehended 1,288 Dominicans trying to enter Puerto Rico illegally by boat. The U.S. Coast Guard has stopped 303 others on the high seas and returned them to their homeland.

During that same period, those known to have eluded authorities -- 1,517 -- outnumber those who were caught. The surge since October points to increased desperation from the last fiscal year, when in 12 months the Border Patrol caught 1,731 and 1,751 were believed to have eluded authorities.

Acknowledging the problem, Dominican President Hipolito Mejia, who took office last August, put together a "social package" to provide more housing, food and education to the poor to try to counteract controversial tax and austerity measures and address what he called the government in bankruptcy that he inherited.