Every day, the relief trucks roar past the high pink walls of the New Hope Ministry in Mariani, on the coast road west of Port-au-Prince.
Every day, people shriek and wave in the hope of persuading them to stop. Some drivers slow down and shout that they will come back tomorrow.
Yet by Friday morning, 10 days after Haiti’s earthquake struck, nobody from the government or any relief agency had walked through the heavy metal gates of the American-owned missionary compound to confront the mayhem within.
Public frustration with the slowness of the aid effort and the government’s declaration that the search and rescue operation had been terminated increased yesterday with the freeing of a young man who had been trapped for the 11 days since the earthquake struck Port-au-PrinceA 24-year-old man was freed from beneath the collapsed Napoli Inn. The record for surviving an earthquake is 14 days set by a man trapped beneath a gym in the 1990 earthquake in the Philippines who had access to rain water.
On Friday I had paid my second visit to the New Hope Ministry, hoping that the misery I had witnessed earlier in the week would have been brought under control: that the aid supplies spreading through the fast-rotting shantytowns at the centre of Port-au-Prince would have reached this forlorn outpost only a few miles out of town.
Instead, I found Father Emil Samedi sitting at a small desk just inside his gate, exhaustion etched on his face, his words filled with despair.
“I’ve been up and down this country and every door is closed,” the priest said. “We are running out of food; our children are throwing up water.
“They keep saying that the government is having a meeting and that soon someone will come. But no one comes and I no longer know what I should do.”
To pass time as he waited for assistance, he decided to conduct a census. Living rough in less than an acre of space around the mission church are 2,027 people.
The plight of New Hope’s forgotten refugees — and countless earthquake survivors like them — highlights both the challenge and the daunting obstacles confronting relief co-ordinators.
Aid is flowing at last. But there is no visible mechanism in place to ensure that it reaches those most in need.
I had found New Hope by chance. Driving around Port-au-Prince earlier in the week, I had absent-mindedly switched on the car radio. There was mostly crackle and hum, but suddenly the dial fell on a strong, clear signal broadcasting a discussion in French and Creole from a hilltop station in Pétionville, a well-to-do suburb that emerged from the earthquake comparatively unscathed.
The station, Signal-FM, was broadcasting from offices a few blocks from my hotel. When I arrived, there was a crowd at the door, and as I squeezed past, a woman pressed a piece of paper into my hand.
“Please give this to them,” she said. “Please tell them we need help.” Inside the studio I found Mario Viau and his wife, Sheyla, presiding over what turned out to be the only radio station in the capital that had broadcast through the earthquake without interruption.
“When the building started shaking, we put on some music and went outside and waited,” said Viau. “When we realised the building was still standing, we went back indoors.”
I handed over my piece of paper, and Sheyla Viau winced. “We’ve had 5,000 of these,” she said. “So many people desperate for help.”
She handed me a sheaf of notes that were being read out on air, all heart-rending pleas for aid or information.
“Emmanuelle is looking for her father, Eric Leconte,” read one. “Jacques Arsène, if you’re alive, contact your daughter Farah,” read another.
One particularly elaborate note prompted me to write down the details. There was a church at Carrefour, a sprawling slum on the western edge of the city, and it housed 3,000 refugees.
“We have pregnant women, new-born handicapped, injured. Need food medicine water tent.” The church’s name was the Eglise du Dieu Vivant — the Church of the Living God.
Early the next morning I headed west. It didn’t take long to realise how difficult the distribution of aid would be along that blighted so-called highway. At every junction there were colossal traffic jams as buses and trucks laden with Haitians tried to make their escape from the city.
Quite apart from the heaps of earthquake rubble, overturned vehicles and unfilled axle-breaking potholes, long stretches of the road are flooded from a tidal surge and broken water pipes.
It passes the capital’s main petrol storage terminal, where a long line of tankers in both directions routinely blocks all lanes as they manoeuvre into position for loading. The average speed is less than 5mph.
I never found the Eglise du Dieu Vivant. A couple of false starts led to hour-long detours through streets choked with people. Houses that had crumbled into the street forced us to turn down rock-strewn alleys that were little wider than goat paths. We got more and more lost. If I could not reach the church in a small rented car, how on earth would an international relief agency deliver aid by truck?
Finally we stopped at the New Hope Ministry in search of directions home. And that was how I walked into yet another of Haiti’s infinite warrens of refugee hell.
Father Emil was out that day, scouring the city for help, and I was greeted by Robinson Decembre, a 33-year-old Haitian recently returned from Miami.
He was so astounded to see a foreigner coming through his gate that he could barely get his complaints out fast enough.
“The pastor is running back and forth trying to get aid, we’re receiving nothing, it’s terrible, it’s terrible, we have no water, no kind of medical attention, we have so many babies, you’re the first [outsider] we’ve seen, we need Red Cross here, we need everything.”
Sprawled over the lawn behind him was the chaotic jumble of mattresses, tarpaulins and blankets that has become a familiar sight in every open space across the region.
“We’ve searched for the mayor but the mayor is nowhere,” said Decembre. “We asked the government and two services but no one will help us.”
Nearby I noticed a woman holding a child with what seemed to be a white crease in its head. I took a closer look, and established that the boy, Adson Jr, aged two, had been hit by a chunk of falling concrete that had actually dented his skull. There was no sign of blood, but the uncovered, untreated wound seemed to have oozed a white substance.
The mother had already taken him to a clinic in Carrefour, only to find hundreds of patients waiting outside. With nowhere to stay, she returned to New Hope.
On Monday I had driven south over the mountains to Jacmel, a seaside resort on a perfect horseshoe bay. Radio reports had spoken of mass devastation. The mountain road was said to be cut off by landslides. No aid was getting through.
The road not only proved to be open — to small four-wheel-drive vehicles only — but a visit to the tiny port yielded a triumph of British ingenuity. There stood Stuart Coles of Plan International, a charity based in Woking, Surrey, supervising the unloading from Dominican coastguard vessels of 4,000 family tents, crates of water, sugar and tea and piles of plastic tarpaulins.
The charity’s staff in the neighbouring Dominican Republic had talked local officials into finding them boats, and had sailed for six hours around the coast, long before the US, the United Nations, the World Food Programme or anyone else was bringing in relief.
“We’ve been working in Haiti since 1973,” said Coles. “We were in a position to move fast, so we did.”
By the end of Monday, hundreds of families who had lost their homes six days earlier had moved into British tents.
There was no such luck for the New Hope Ministry, where Jules Damus, a local community organiser, pulled me away to see the first-aid clinic he was trying to establish in the ruins of another church nearby.
Helped by Odette Pierre, a former nurse who would dispense basic health advice, he had painted a small sign that he proudly hung on the broken gate of the ruined church. “Sant Santé,” it read in Creole — health centre.
But what about medicine, bandages, doctors, I asked him. His “clinic” didn’t have a single sticking plaster, let alone morphine, electricity or water.
Damus shrugged. “We cannot wait for others to help us,” he said. “We have to start helping ourselves.”
Source:The Times
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