Haitians clamour for food as two more rescued alive

Haitians wait in line for food and water distribution as a U.S. Navy helicopter lands in Port-au-Prince yesterday. REUTERS/ Hans Deryk

PORT-AU-PRINCE, (Reuters) – Rescuers pulled two  barely alive survivors from the rubble of Port-au-Prince yesterday as hungry and homeless Haitians clamoured for food, which  was slow in arriving 10 days after the massive earthquake.

A Haitian boy cries while waiting in line for food and water at a tent encampment in Port-au-Prince yesterday. REUTERS/Hans Deryk

An 84-year-old woman was pulled from under a wrecked  building yesterday, the doctor who treated her said.

“They pulled her out early this morning. She was barely  responding, she had wounds all over her body, and maggots,”  said Dr Vladimir Larouche, a Haitian-American doctor from New  York, working at Port-au-Prince General Hospital.

“I treated her and made her stable. The (U.S.) army  evacuated her to a boat,” he told Reuters.

Elsewhere in the shattered capital, an Israeli rescue team  freed a 22-year-old man from the rubble. Rescuers and local  residents hugged and celebrated after pulling out the man, who  was limp and suffering from dehydration.

Although aid from around the world has been pouring into  the wrecked city in a huge U.S.-led relief operation, quake  survivors camped out in the rubble-strewn streets still  complained bitterly that they were not receiving food.

“We are hungry, we are thirsty, we can’t stand it anymore.  We want food, we want water. Down with Preval. Long live  Obama,” shouted a group of protesters outside the police  station where President Rene Preval’s government is operating.

Haitians wait in line for food and water distribution as a U.S. Navy helicopter lands in Port-au-Prince yesterday. REUTERS/ Hans Deryk

Police pushed back the few dozen protesters.

Preval, whose own presidential palace and home collapsed in  the Jan. 12 quake that killed up to 200,000 people, said his  government and international partners were doing everything  possible to get assistance to the hundreds of thousands of  needy survivors.

“We are not sitting idle doing nothing. I know the scale of  the problem and how people are suffering,” he said.

U.S. President Barack Obama has sent in a large military  task force to spearhead the international relief efforts.

Up to 1.5 million Haitians lost their homes in the  earthquake that rocked the poor Caribbean country.

Relief agencies estimated one-third of Haiti’s 9 million  people would need emergency food, water and shelter for an  extended period.

“We can do this 24 hours a day for the next six months and  we still won’t meet the need,” said First Sergeant Rob  Farnsworth, part of a U.S. Army airborne unit handing out food  packs at a squalid camp where survivors lived in the open air.

SOME SIGNS OF DAILY LIFE

There were some signs of daily life resuming. Taptaps,  Haiti’s small, colorfully decorated private buses, circulated  in Port-au-Prince, sharing streets with the earth-movers and  digging machines clearing debris.

Banks were scheduled to reopen today and money  transfer agencies did brisk business after opening yesterday.

“I want to get some cash sent by my family from Canada.  It’s $500 but it’s difficult. There are so many people,” said  businessman Aslyn Denis, 31, waiting in a line with hundreds of  people, some of them jostling each other, outside a Unitransfer  office.

The dead body of a young man lay in a street, his head  swollen and bloody. Residents said he tried to steal money and  was stoned by a crowd. He wore socks but his shoes were gone  and his pockets had been pulled out.

Edmond Mulet, acting head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission  in Haiti, said coordination in delivering aid was getting  better every day. But Henriette Chamouillet, the World Health  Organization representative in Haiti, said it remained a  problem.

She said the Haitian prime minister complained at a morning  meeting with aid workers that only 10 percent of the population  in makeshift camps had received any food aid while some camps  had received three times the amount of food they needed.

Nearly 1,000 hungry people swarmed a U.S. military truck as  an 82nd Airborne company known as “the Beast” handed out food  and water at an encampment on a soccer field. Overwhelmed, the  troops pulled out after distributing 600 packaged meals,  leaving 250 food packs still on the truck.

A large supermarket, Big Star Market, reopened in the  Petionville suburb on Friday, selling everything from slabs of  ham and goat meat to Valentine’s Day chocolates. But the store  manager said they had only a week or two of stocks left and had  received no deliveries.

U.S. Navy helicopters ferried in boxes of water to  distribute to Haitians lined up at a sprawling survivors’ camp  that covered a golf course. Actor Sean Penn stopped by to  deliver antibiotics, painkillers and water filters. “The whole  city has collapsed,” he said.

U.S. troops were giving away 50,000 solar- and  crank-powered radios to help displaced Haitians receive  announcements telling them where aid was available.

More than 13,000 U.S. military personnel are in Haiti and  on ships offshore, flying in supplies, evacuating the seriously  wounded and protecting aid distribution points. The United  Nations is adding 2,000 troops and 1,500 police to its  9,000-member peacekeeping mission.

MILLIONS PLEDGED

More than $1.2 billion has been pledged to help rebuild  roads, government buildings and homes, but the World Bank said  much more would be needed to get Haiti on its feet.

“My anticipation is that $1.2 billion is just the floor,”  the bank’s director for the Caribbean, Yvonne Tsikata, told  France 24 television.

The International Monetary Fund urged donors gathering in  Montreal tomorrow to adopt a Marshall Plan for Haiti, similar  to the U.S. effort that helped rebuild Europe after World War  Two. “It is not unrealistic to imagine that the country can be  rebuilt as a prosperous nation. But it needs help over a  prolonged period,” IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn  wrote on the Huffington Post website.

Haitians are realizing it could take months or years to  regain some sense of normalcy.

“We want it to be over, but it’s not finished yet, things  are bad,” said Jeanette, a 53-year-old architect shopping at  the Big Star Market. “We have no stability, no direction, we’ve  been left to fend for ourselves. We can’t plan for the future,  we’re just living day-to-day.”