Tue, Sep 28, 2004 page6

• Haitians recover amid mud, debris

  • AP
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  In a cathedral ankle-deep in mud and overturned pews, Haitians prayed for 1,500 killed by Tropical Storm Jeanne and gave thanks for their lives -- though most lost homes and belongings -- while the UN rushed in hundreds more peacekeepers to stem looting by gangsters and ordinary citizens of the ravaged city of Gonaives.

  The Brazilian general in charge of the UN force criticized slow pace of relief that is compounding the suffering of traumatized survivors.

  

  A Haitian woman walks through a flooded street in Gonaives, Haiti, at dusk on Sunday. A week after Hurricane Jeanne, the tragedy continues in Gonaives and UN peacekeeping forces plan to send more personnel to the area to help control outbreaks of violence and the looting of aid being distributed to flood victims. Attacks on trucks carrying humanitarian aid are hindering the delivery of supplies and forcing UN troops to fire into the air or use smoke bombs to disperse avalanches of people.

  PHOTO: EPA

  "The situation remains critical," General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira said in an interview with the official Agencia Brasil.

  He said many people were suffering from diarrhea while others, many of them children, were contracting gangrene. Amputations were being performed under horrendous conditions, he said. Most injuries being treated are gashes from collapsing roofs or pieces of zinc roof hidden by the mud that still covers the city, where most survivors walk barefooted.

  Anne Poulsen of the UN World Food Program said relief agencies were working around the clock trying to get food to victims -- even using donkeys.

  When trucks carrying 7 tonnes of food from Cap-Haitien -- the port to the north -- were blocked by mudslides, "we unloaded the food from trucks and put it on to donkeys and mules to reach localities ... where people had not eaten for a week" since the storm's passage, Poulsen said.

  WFP and CARE International distributed 100 tonnes of food in the past three days -- enough to feed 48,000 families for one day, she said.

  The director of the WFP Haiti operation, Guy Gavreau, said floods from Jeanne destroyed the rice and fruit harvest in the Artibonite, Haiti's breadbasket, "so now the country can't even feed itself without outside help."

  At the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Charles Borromee, four people stood and prayed in the back, unwilling to venture into the disaster zone of overturned pews and trash caked with ankle-deep mud. Outside, a woman among hundreds sheltering at the church brushed her teeth and spat toothpaste into the debris.

  A couple walked up, shoes newly waxed and shining, for Mass in a makeshift chapel.

  "We don't have anything but we're doing our best," Joselyne Ashalus, 31, said in front of a classroom where she sleeps on the floor with eight other people.

  "After all this we have to be respectful and we have to thank God for saving us," she said, grateful that the storm that destroyed their home spared her five children

  Ashalus braided one daughter's hair and decorated it with pink and white hair grips. Her other children stood nearby -- a baby with yellow iodine-soaked bandages on both legs, a girl with one on her ankle and a toddler covered in a rash.

  Sunday night, lightning bolts lit the blacked-out city, threatening a thunderstorm that would add to the miseries of survivors living on sidewalks and rooftops of flooded homes.

  Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue said Saturday the storm killed at least 1,500 people.

  On Sunday, the civil defense agency's Abel Nazaire said more bodies were recovered from debris in Gonaives, raising the number of corpses found to 1,330. Another 2,601 people were injured, and 1,056 are missing.

  Nazaire acknowledged many of the missing can be presumed dead -- washed out to sea or under the rubble of collapsed homes in areas still inaccessible.

  Some 300,000 people are homeless from the storm, including about 200,000 in Gonaives, he said.
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