A Forest, Ont. woman is desperately trying to rescue her husband from the destruction and chaos in Haiti but she says the earthquake left him without any proof that he's married to a Canadian.

Stacey Gala's ordeal has been fraught with ironic and unfortunate twists. The day she found out that her bid to sponsor her Haitian husband had been approved, the earthquake struck, flattening the embassy handling the application.

Gala said she had made photocopies of all the paperwork just in case, but now that the 7.0 tremor has left the impoverished country in tatters, officials don't have any equipment to receive the documents.

"It's very difficult on a good day to communicate with Haiti and send information," she said in a live interview from London, Ont. with CTV's Canada AM on Tuesday.

She said she has spoken with officials in Ottawa who have reassured her that they are taking her case seriously.

"They say they are doing whatever they can to reunite me with my husband," she said.

But in the meantime, Gala's husband Frantzy is growing increasingly desperate to leave Grand Goave, the village located about 50 kilometres west of the capital city Port-au-Prince.

The earthquake devastated the region but he has still managed to get clean water from a local Christian mission that has been set up in the area.

"He's okay for now but he's struggling," Gala said.

Fortunately for the couple, Frantzy Gala is in an area where there is some cellphone service. Stacey Gala said she last spoke to her husband on Monday night.

She felt even luckier when she was able to spot her husband and several of their friends amid the crowds shown on the news. The man is staying in the same village where 17 students from B.C. were rescued over the weekend.

"Even before I saw it on the news, he told me the story of the UN coming in and evacuating Canadians," she said. "He tried so hard -- he wanted to go with them."

She said some Haitians were able to travel to Canada with their Canadian spouses, despite not having the appropriate documents.

"Unfortunately because I was not there with him, he had no way to prove that he has a Canadian wife," she said. "He had no evidence to prove that he is married to me so they had no way of knowing if he was making it up."