HAITIANS PRAISE GOD AFTER
APOCALYPTIC QUAKE
PORT-AU-PRINCE,
(AP)
JANUARY 19, 2010
(STAR) Drumbeats called the faithful to a yesterday
Mass praising God amid a scene resembling the Apocalypse — a collapsed cathedral
in a city cloaked with the smell of death, where aid is slow to reach survivors
and rescue crews battle to pry an ever-smaller number of the living from the
ruins.
Sunlight streamed through what little was left of blown-out stained windows as the Rev. Eric Toussaint preached to a small crowd of survivors. A rotting body lay in its main entrance.
"Why give thanks to God? Because we are here," Toussaint said. "We say 'Thank you God.' What happened is the will of God. We are in the hands of God now."
As Catholic and Protestant worshippers across the city met for their first yesterday services since the magnitude-7.0 quake, many Haitians were still waiting for food and water and some took vengeance against looters.
Rescue workers were frustrated by the stuggle to get aid through the small, damaged and clogged airport run by US military controllers, and to get it from the airport into town. Doctors Without Borders said yesterday that a cargo plane carrying a field hospital was denied permission to land at the airport and had to be rerouted through the Dominican Republic — creating a 24-hour delay in setting up a crucial field hospital.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called the quake "one of the most serious crises in decades."
"The damage, destruction and loss of life are just overwhelming," he said before flying toward Haiti on yesterday.
Nobody knows how many died in Tuesday's quake. Haiti's government alone has already recovered 20,000 bodies — not counting those recovered by independent agencies or relatives themselves, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told The Associated Press.
The Pan American Health Organization now says 50,000 to 100,000 people perished in the quake. Bellerive said 100,000 would "seem to be the minimum."
At the roofless cathedral, elderly women worried the beads of their rosaries and prayed for the intervention of Our Lady Of The Ascension, to whom the 81-year-old church is named.
A military helicopter roared overhead, drowning out a hymn by the congregation. Above loomed the partially destroyed office of the archbishop who died nearby and another building whose blown-out walls had laid it open it like a doll's house.
An apparently demented elderly woman began preaching on the sideline of the Mass: "Where is our justice? Now the palace of justice has been broken down ... we are all infected by disease. The end is near."
Amid the struggle for food, some turned to looting, infuriating people struggling to guard what little they still have.
Two suspected looters lay on the street in the Delmas neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, both beaten and with their hands bound together. Some in the angry crowd that gathered around them said they had been attacked by angry residents, others that police had caused their wounds.
One lay completely motionless, his dreadlocked hair stained by a deep pool of dark crimson blood. The other lay bleeding profusely but occasionally twitched his leg.
A few hours later, a reporter found both men were dead. However they got that way — whether vigilante justice or police execution — all agreed that they were criminals who had escaped from the destroyed prison.
There were also occasions of joy: An American team pulled a woman alive from a collapsed university building where she had been trapped for 97 hours. Near dawn, another crew rescued three survivors from deep in the pancaked ruins of a supermarket.
And a woman was pulled alive, dehydrated but otherwise uninjured, from the ruins of the Montana Hotel, to the applause of onlookers.
The son of co-owner Nadine Cardoso said he could hear her voice from the rubble. Twelve hours later, with more than 20 friends and relatives watching, she was lowered from a hill of debris on a stretcher.
"It's a little miracle," her husband, Reinhard Riedl, said after hearing she was alive in the wreckage. "She's one tough cookie. She is indestructible."
But the rescue was bittersweet for Cardoso's sister Gerthe: Rescuers had to abandon a search for her 7-year-old grandson after an aftershock closed a space where he was believed to be.
UN humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said 1,739 rescue workers in 43 teams with 161 dogs and high-tech equipment so far have saved more than 70 people.
The UN itself lost at least 40 confirmed dead — including its mission chief Hedi Annabi — with hundreds still missing. "For the United Nations, this is the gravest and greatest single loss in the history of our organization," Ban said.
But the UN secretary-general said the agency was already feeding 40,000 and hopes to feed 2 million within a month.
Florence Louis, seven months pregnant with two children, was one of thousands of Haitians who gathered at a gate at the Cite Soleil slum, where UN World Food Program workers handed out high-energy biscuits for the first time.
"It is enough because I didn't have anything at all," said Louis, 29, clutching four packets of biscuits.
The Haitian government has established 14 distribution points for food and other supplies, and US Army helicopters scouted locations for more. Aid groups opened five emergency health centers. Vital gear, such as water-purification units, was arriving from abroad.
On a hillside golf course, perhaps 50,000 people were sleeping in a makeshift tent city overlooking the stricken capital and paratroopers of the US 82nd Airborne Division flew in to set up a base for handing out water and food.
As relief teams grappled with on-the-ground obstacles, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited and pledged more American assistance. President Barack Obama met with former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton in Washington and urged Americans to donate to Haiti relief efforts.
At the cathedral, the Rev. Toussaint described his own near-miraculous survival.
"I watched the destruction of the cathedral from this window," he said, pointing to a window in what remains of the archdiocese office. "I am not dead because God has a plan for me."
"What happens is a sign from God, saying that we must recognize his power - we need to reinvent ourselves,"
Others, however, were angry.
"It's a catastrophe and it is God who has put this upon us," said Jean-Andre Noel, 39-year-old computer technician "Those who live in Haiti need everything. We need food, we need drink, we need medicine. We need help."
Haitians pray, cry for help in the ruins (philstar.com) Updated January 18, 2010 06:00 AM
PORT-AU-PRINCE
(AP) – Prayers of thanksgiving and cries for help rose from a roofless cathedral
and the huddled homeless yesterday, the sixth day of an epic humanitarian crisis
that was straining the world's ability to respond and igniting flare-ups of
violence amid the rubble.
A leading aid group echoed complaints about the supply bottleneck and skewed priorities at the US-controlled airport. The general in charge said the US military was "working aggressively" to speed up deliveries.
In the ruins of the Port-Au-Prince cathedral, gathered beneath shattered stained glass for their first yesterday Mass since Tuesday's earthquake, survivors were told by their priest, "We are in the hands of God now." But anger mounted hourly that other helping hands were slow in getting food and water to millions in need.
"The government is a joke. The UN is a joke," Jacqueline Thermiti, 71, said as she lay in the dust with dozens of dying elderly outside their collapsed nursing home near the airport. "We're a kilometer (half a mile) from the airport and we're going to die of hunger."
Water was delivered to more people around the capital, where an estimated 300,000 were living in the streets, but food and medicine were still scarce. Pregnant women gave birth in the streets. The injured arrived in wheelbarrows and on people's backs at hurriedly erected field hospitals. Authorities warned of looting and violence. In downtown Port-au-Prince, where people set bonfires to burn uncollected bodies, gunfire rang out and bands of machete-wielding young men, their faces covered with bandanas, roamed the streets.
"This is one of the most serious crises in decades," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said as he flew into the Haitian capital. "The damage, destruction and loss of life are just overwhelming."
A reliable death toll may be weeks away, but the Pan American Health Organization estimates 50,000 to 100,000 died in the 7.0-magnitude tremor, and Haitian officials believe the number is higher.
Celebrating Mass at the once-proud pink-and-white cathedral, now a shell of rubble where a rotting body lay in the entrance, the Rev. Eric Toussaint preached of thanksgiving to a small congregation of old women and other haggard survivors assembled under the open sky.
"Why give thanks to God? Because we are here," Toussaint said. "What happened is the will of God. We are in the hands of God now."
Mondesir Raymone, a 27-year-old single mother of two, was grateful. "We have survived by the grace of God," she said.
But others were angry.
"It's a catastrophe and it is God who has put this upon us," said Jean-Andre Noel, 39, a computer technician. "Those who live in Haiti need everything. We need food, we need drink, we need medicine. We need help."
Were his parishioners being helped? Toussaint was asked. "Not yet," he replied.
UN officials said they were feeding 40,000 people, but must raise that to 2 million within a month. The US aid chief, Rajiv Shah, after visiting Port-au-Prince, told "Fox News yesterday" he believed the US distributed 130,000 "meals ready to eat" on Saturday, but the need was much larger. "We're really trying to address it," he said.
The Geneva-based aid group Doctors Without Borders was blunt: "There is little sign of significant aid distribution."
The "major difficulty," it said, was the bottleneck at the airport, under US military control. It said a flight carrying its own inflatable hospital was denied landing clearance and was being trucked overland from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, almost 200 miles away in the Dominican Republic, delaying its arrival by 24 hours.
French, Brazilian and other officials had earlier complained about the US-run airport's refusal to allow their supply planes to land. A World Food Program official told The New York Times that the Americans' priorities were out of sync, allowing too many US military flights and too few aid deliveries.
The US has completely taken over Port-au-Prince airspace and incoming flights have to register with Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, said Chief Master Sgt. Ty Foster, Air Force spokesman here.
"You won't have the stray cats and dogs allowed to come into the airspace and clog it up," he said.
The on-the-ground US commander in Haiti, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, acknowledged the bottleneck issue.
"We're working aggressively to open up other ways to get in here. The ports are part of that," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The US Navy has dispatched a salvage ship to Haiti to assess and possibly begin repairs to the Port-au-Prince seaport, which has been rendered useless for incoming aid because of quake damage.
Keen reported "increasing incidents of violence," as a weakened Haitian police force and UN peacekeeping contingent were overwhelmed.
In the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Delmas, a crowd gathered yesterday around the bodies of two accused looters, who had been beaten to death by angry residents. Onlookers said they were known criminals who had escaped from the main prison when it collapsed in the quake. About 4,000 inmates escaped.
Angry survivors loitered amid piles of burning garbage in the Bel-Air slum. "White guys, get the hell out!" they shouted in apparent frustration at the sight of more and more foreigners in their streets who were not delivering help.
They also sounded furious with President Rene Preval, who hasn't been seen at a rescue site or gone on radio to address the nation since the quake struck.
"Preval out! Aristide come back!" some shouted, appealing for a return of the populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted in 2004. From his South African exile, Aristide said last week he wants to return to Haiti, but spoke of no concrete plans to do so.
The tragic scenes across this crippled city, choking on the stench of death — of people still dying in the streets, of hands desperately reaching out for water or food, of people on their knees praying for help — have depressed some of those working hardest to help.
The UN mission chief, Tunisian Hedi Annabi, and other top UN officials were killed in the collapse of their headquarters, among at least 40 confirmed dead. Hundreds of peacekeepers and other UN staff were missing.
At that destroyed UN building on yesterday, just 15 minutes after secretary-general Moon visited, rescuers lifted a Danish staff member alive from the ruins, UN officials reported. He was talking and was whisked away for medical treatment.
And at a collapsed Caribbean Supermarket where search teams from Florida and New York City worked overnight, a policeman reported that three people had been pulled out alive around 6 a.m.
More than 1,700 rescue workers had saved more than 70 lives since the quake, a UN spokeswoman said in Geneva.
"There are still people living" in collapsed buildings, Elisabeth Byrs told The Associated Press. "Hope continues."
In such conditions, she said, people might survive until Monday.