PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The world still can’t get enough food and water to the hungry and thirsty one week after an earthquake shattered Haiti’s capital. The airport remains a bottleneck, the port is a shambles. The Haitian government is invisible, nobody has taken firm charge and the police have largely given up.
“God has abandoned us! The foreigners have abandoned us!” yelled Micheline Ursulin, tearing at her hair as she rushed past a large pile of decaying bodies.
Three of her children died in the quake, and her surviving daughter is in the hospital with broken limbs and an infection.
Rescue groups continue to work, even though time is running out for those buried by the quake. A Mexican team created after that nation’s 1985 earthquake rescued Ena Zizi, 69. She had survived a week buried in the ruins of the residence of Haiti’s Roman Catholic archbishop, Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot, whose body was found Tuesday sitting in a chair in what appeared to be his office.
Doctors said Zizi was dehydrated and had a dislocated hip and broken leg. “I’m all right, sort of,” she said, lying on a foil thermal blanket outside the Cuban hospital, her gray hair covered in white dust.
Survivors who had lost their homes and possessions were growing desperate.
“We need so much. Food, clothes. We need everything. I don’t know whose responsibility it is, but they need to give us something soon,” said Sophia Eltime, a 29-year-old mother of two who has been living under a bedsheet with seven members of her extended family.
The reasons for the slow arrival of aid vary:
• National and international authorities lost in the quake many of the leaders best suited to organize a response.
• Woefully inadequate infrastructure and a near-complete failure in phone and Internet communications complicate efforts to reach those in need.
• Fears of looting and violence keep aid groups and governments from moving as quickly as they’d like.
• Pre-existing poverty and malnutrition put some at risk.
Governments have pledged nearly $1 billion in aid, and thousands of tons of food and medical supplies have been shipped. But much remains trapped in warehouses, diverted to the neighboring Dominican Republic or left hovering in the air. The nonfunctioning seaport and impassable roads make it even more difficult to get aid to the people.
Aid is being turned back from the single-runway airport, where the U.S. military has come under criticism for poorly prioritizing flights.
About 2,200 Marines established a beachhead west of Port- au-Prince on Tuesday to help speed aid delivery, in addition to 9,000 already on the ground. The United Nations was sending reinforcements as well: The Security Council voted Tuesday to add 2,000 peacekeepers to the 7,000 already in Haiti, and 1,500 more police to the 2,100- strong international force.
Hanging over the entire effort was an overwhelming fear among relief officials that Haitians’ desperation would spill over into violence.
Occasionally, those fears have been borne out. Looters rampaged through part of downtown Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, just four blocks from where U.S. troops landed at the presidential palace.
U.S. officials insisted they had no plans to take on a policing role in Haiti, and the arriving Marines are allowed to use force only in self-defense, according to U.S. Maj. Gen. Cornell A. Wilson Jr. But troops of the 82nd Airborne took up positions outside the General Hospital on Tuesday when the crowd grew too large.
Some police are urging citizens to take the law into their own hands, and neighborhoods are creating their own security forces, forming night brigades and machete-armed mobs to fight bandits.
Photos.
