WASHOUGAL — Walt Ratterman has been in some tough situations. He’s negotiated hostile borderlands, dangerous jungles and countries in crisis all over the map.
The 57-year-old Washougal resident is a survivor. That’s why his family continues to hold out hope, more than a week after an earthquake in Haiti flattened Ratterman’s hotel in the capital of Port-au-Prince.
Particularly when rescuers continue to find people alive under the rubble, said his daughter, Briana Ratterman.
She was looking at an update her mother, Jeanne Ratterman, had just printed off their computer.
“They just found a French girl,” Briana Ratterman said Wednesday afternoon in her parents’ home just inside Skamania County. “Search-and-rescue teams are overwhelmed that people can still be found alive.”
Walt Ratterman was in Haiti working on one of the solar-energy projects that have taken him all over the world. He is co-founder of the nonprofit Sun Energy Power International, based in Washougal.
Because of the nature of his humanitarian aid work, Walt Ratterman goes where poor people need help, which also can mean traveling to political trouble spots.
“All the time,” Briana said. “Haiti was one of the more mild places. He was out of the city, working at really remote clinics. But he could still communicate, and there was such a family atmosphere at all those clinics.”
It certainly shaped up as an easier assignment than a trip to Southeast Asia, helping a backcountry tribe that was threatened by genocide.
“He had to walk for four days, hoping not to get caught” by border guards.
“That was a time I felt really vigilant,” Briana Ratterman said.
As a program assistant with the aid agency, she also has accompanied her father on some interesting business trips, she added.
“I’ve been to Burma. They dressed me up like a boy and covered me with mosquito repellent,” she said.
During a trip to South America, she and her father traveled to Shuar Indian villages in the Amazon — places so dangerous you didn’t dare touch the trees.
“The trunks were covered with fire ants,” she said. And you didn’t want to stand under them, either. Farther up the trees, poisonous green snakes were feasting on ripe fruit.
“We were in mud up to our thighs,” she said. “We powered 16 homes. That’s how I started working for him.”
But despite all the trouble spots she’s seen and heard her father describe, “You never think about natural disasters,” Briana Ratterman said.
He wasn’t the sort of person to check into a luxury hotel, but he’d been booked into the Montana Hotel by the U.S. Agency for International Development, she said.
“In an e-mail, he told me that he could work out in their gym at 4 a.m., before he did anything else,” she said. “That was a perk at the hotel.”
In Haiti, her father was helping a nonprofit health agency power up small rural clinics.
While she can’t totally shut out her concerns, “The worry happens in the back of my mind,” she said.
Briana counters those worries by thinking about how “he’s so calm in any situation that’s challenging.”
Her husband has even taken on challenges of discipline and endurance just for the heck of it, Jeanne Ratterman said.
“He went on a 40-day liquid fast once, just to see if he could do it,” she said.
Jeanne Ratterman has been spending long hours at the computer during the past week, keeping track of developments via the Web.
“I’ve slept about three hours a night,” she said. Tuesday night was a treat, though, after a friend came by and provided massages for both women.
“The massage helped immensely,” Jeanne Ratterman said. “Last night, I slept almost five hours.”
Briana Ratterman has been finding some diversion though music. A Paul Simon CD was playing Wednesday afternoon: “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.” On the nearby family piano, Briana occasionally tries her own hand at the classic. She’s learning to play it for her father.
