Haiti Quake Victims Frustrated Over Slow Spread of Aid

by: Newswire (MCT Campus) • January 15, 2010 

PORT-AU-PRINCE— Relief efforts struggled to get food, water and medicine to the hardest hit areas of the island on Friday, as security deteriorated amid a government vacuum and world leaders pledged more aid and personal visits to this devastated nation.

There were reports of some looting in the capital, even as the U.S. military assumed control of the airport and helicopters airlifted supplies from a carrier off the coast.

Evans Paul, former mayor of Port-au-Prince, summed up Haiti’s two most urgent needs: “We need rescue and security,” he said.

With the USS Carl Vinson stationed in the bay of Port-au-Prince, the commander of the U.S. military relief effort said personnel and supplies were moving into the country, though their distribution was hampered by impassible roads and a desperate population.

In some neighborhoods, angry and frustrated men created road blockades from corpses.

“If the citizens of Haiti will just remain in place and remain calm, help is on the way,” Gen. Douglas Fraser, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, said at a press briefing in Miami.

The Haitian government, he said, had begun broadcasting the locations of distribution centers for food, water and medicine.

“Go to those places. Use those places,” he said. “That’s where you can get help.”

A reprieve also arrived from President Barack Obama, who on Friday approved Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, which will allow them to stay and work in the U.S., and send money home to their loved ones.

Also Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she would travel to Haiti on Saturday to review the U.S.’s ongoing relief efforts and survey damage from the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck the Caribbean nation Tuesday.

Vice President Joe Biden also planned a trip to Miami with Secretary of Homeland of Security Janet Napolitano to meet with Haitian-Americans.

As many sought to leave the island, rescue efforts for those who remained continued around the clock.

At one site in Port-au-Prince, at a house near the presidential palace, rescue workers extricated two older people — a man and a woman — and carried them away on stretchers, battered but alive. The crowd that had gathered burst into applause.

As relief workers focused their rescue efforts on the capital city, other parts of this country were still awaiting food, water and medicine.

In the coastal city of Jacmel in southwestern Haiti, scores of homes and buildings were reduced to rubble, and roads were impassible.

As encampments sprung up throughout the island, Haitians grew tired of waiting for international relief and took matters into their own hands — providing security, and rationing what little they have.

Twenty young men patrolled the rocky soccer field and surrounding community, keeping vigil over the hundreds of homeless who had camped out night after frigid night in the Marie Therese neighborhood of Port-au-Prince.

The tired and weary who camped in the field sang for comfort. “Oh Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds thy hands have made … ”

Not far away, their cry for help was captured in a few Creole words painted on a bedsheet hung between two trees: “Help. We need water. We need medicine — food.”

Many Haitians were critical of their government for not acting faster to bring help.

“Nobody is coming,” said Jasmine Pierre, who along with 10 members of her family have been camped out in a Port-au-Prince park since Tuesday.

“I think only God is in charge. The government should be here, any government. There is no government in the palace right now. I don’t even really know if Haiti has a government today.”

Haiti’s government institutions struggled to recover from their own devastation.

No single federal government office building remains standing, and officials were looking for a proper headquarters from which to organize relief operations, first lady Elizabeth Preval said.

“The Haitian government has a problem,” conceded President Rene Preval on Thursday.

“Before we can help the people, we have to figure out how to function under an extraordinarily difficult situation.”

At a police station near Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, government officials set up a makeshift command center, said former Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis.

“All the government ministers — President Preval, parliamentarians, advisors — all are here and are looking at what will be the new strategy from the engagement of help and assistance of the international community,” he said.

Fraser, the commander of U.S. military operations, could not give a timeline for relief to reach the hardest hit areas.

“We don’t have a good idea of the full extent of the problems,” he said.

More military forces were on the way as well to help the 4,200 U.S. personnel already in the country or offshore on the USS Carl Vinson.

An additional 6,300 military personnel are scheduled to arrive by Monday.

(Charles, Daniel and Robles reported from Haiti. Jen Lebovich reported from Guantanamo Bay. Daniel Shoer Roth reported from the Dominican Republic. Chang reported from Miami, as did staff writers Douglas Hanks, Curtis Morgan, Carol Rosenberg, Nancy San Martin and Jim Wyss. Lesley Clark contributed from Port-au-Prince).

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© 2010, The Miami Herald
Visit them online at: www.miamiherald.com
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

by Jacqueline Charles, Trenton Daniel, Frances Robles and Daniel Chang
McClatchy Newspapers / (MCT)

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