Desperation in Haiti
Anger growing over slow pace of effort as injuries top 10,000
Foreign aid arriving slowly in Haiti following the deadly earthquake.
LES CAYES, Haiti — Pressure for a coordinated response to Haiti’s deadly weekend earthquake mounted Wednesday as more bodies were pulled from the rubble and the injured continued to arrive from remote areas in search of medical care.
Aid was slowly trickling in to help the thousands who were left homeless.
International aid workers on the ground said hospitals in the areas worst hit by Saturday’s quake are mostly incapacitated and that there is a desperate need for medical equipment.
Foreign aid was arriving, but slowly.
U.S. Coast Guard helicopter crews concentrated on the most urgent task, ferrying the injured to lessstressed medical facilities.
A U.S. Navy amphibious warship, the USS Arlington, was expected to head for Haiti with a surgical team and landing craft.
“The hospitals are all broken and collapsed, the operating rooms aren’t functional, and then if you bring tents, it’s hurricane season, they can blow right away,” said Dr. Barth Green, President and co-founder of Project Medishare, an organization that has worked in Haiti since 1994 to improve health services.
But the government told at least one foreign organization that has been operating in the country for nearly three decades that it did not need assistance from hundreds of its medical volunteers.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Ariel Henry said Wednesday that his administration will work to avoid “repeat history on the mismanagement and coordination of aid,” a reference to the chaos that followed the country’s devastating 2010 earthquake, when the government was accused of not getting all of the money raised by donors to the people who needed it.
On Wednesday, Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency left the quake death toll at 1,941. But it raised the number of injured to more than 10,000, many of whom waited for hours outside in the heat for medical assistance.
The magnitude 7.2 quake destroyed more than 7,000 homes and damaged over 12,000, leaving about 30,000 families homeless, officials said.
Schools, offices and churches also were demolished or damaged.
Tensions were growing over the slow pace of aid efforts.
At the airport in the southwest city of Les Cayes, one of the hardest-hit areas, throngs of people began to gather outside the fence at the terminal after an aid flight arrived and crews began loading boxes into waiting trucks.
A small squad of Haitian national police in military-style uniforms was posted at the airport to guard the aid shipments.
One of the squad members fired two warning shots to disperse a group of young men.
Angry crowds also massed at collapsed buildings in the city, demanding tarps to create temporary shelters that were needed more than ever after Tropical Storm Grace brought heavy rain Monday and Tuesday, compounding the impoverished Caribbean nation’s misery.
One of the first food deliveries by local authorities — a couple dozen boxes of rice and pre-measured, bagged meal kits — reached a tent encampment set up in one of the poorest areas of Les Cayes.
But the shipment was insufficient for the hundreds who have lived under tents and tarps for five days.
Gerda Francoise, 24, was one of dozens who lined up in the heat in hopes of receiving food. “I don’t know what I’m going to get, but I need something to take back to my tent,” Francoise said. “I have a child.”
The quake wiped out many of the sources of food and income that many of the poor depend on for survival in Haiti, which is already struggling with the coronavirus, gang violence and the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
“We don’t have anything. Even the (farm) animals are gone. They were killed by the rockslides,” said Elize Civil, 30, a farmer in the village of Fleurant, near the quake’s epicenter.
Civil’s village and many of those in the Nippes province depend on livestock such as goats, cows and chickens for much of their income, said Christy Delafield, who works with the U.s.-based relief organization Mercy Corps.
The group is considering cash distributions to allow residents to continue buying local products from small local businesses that are vital to their communities.
Large-scale aid has not yet reached many areas, and one dilemma for donors is that pouring huge amounts of staple foods purchased abroad could, in the long run, hurt local producers.
“We don’t want to flood the area with a lot of products coming in from off the island,” Delafield said.