Aid trickles to Haiti countryside after quake of the century

Sun, 24 Jan 2010

Port-au-Prince - Aid this weekend started trickling through to outlying towns crushed by the recent Haitian earthquake, which is now officially one of the worst of the past 100 years as the government confirmed a death toll of at least 112,000. In Leogane, about 40 kilometers west of Port-au-Prince, hundreds of women waited in 30-degree-Celsius temperatures for food coming from various German and other aid organizations.

Doctors from Japan, Canada and Germany have already arrived here, but the first food aid was being distributed on Saturday and Sunday. The town of 120,000 was nearly leveled by the quake.

Although the search for survivors has been formally ended by the Haitian government, there were still miracles: A French team on Saturday, 11 days after the 7.0-magnitude quake leveled the capital Port-au-Prince, pulled a 24-year-old man from the rubble of a hotel.

To date, dozens of international rescue teams have extracted 133 survivors from destroyed buildings, a difficult task made even more dangerous by a steady stream of aftershocks. Haitians have also rescued an untold number of friends, families and strangers from the wreckage, using bare hands and primitive tools.

An estimated 609,000 people around the capital city alone are homeless, the International Organization for Migration reported in Geneva. IOM spokesperson Jean-Philippe Chauzy said Sunday in Geneva that tents are urgently needed. Meanwhile, more than 130,000 people have, at the urging of the Haitian government, migrated to the relatively undamaged north and west of the country.

The high-powered Hope for Haiti telethon raised 58 million dollars from the US and elsewhere for earthquake relief in the first 24 hours since the event, organizers announced. The Friday night television broadcast featured more than 100 top stars from film, television and music and was seen worldwide.

The total does not include corporate donations, large private donors or iTunes downloads of music from the Hope for Haiti show. Organizers said that the album was the top music download on Saturday in 18 countries.

The Haitian government was coming back to life. Haitian Information Minister Marie Laurence Joselin Lassegue has set up operations on a camp table behind a crooked wall left standing after the January 12 disaster. Her open-air workplace is near the police station at the airport, where the remains of the government are working. She has seven workers sharing two laptops.

Lassegue said there are 329 refugee camps. "We are sending medical aid to those points. That is our current strategy."

Concern was on the rise about the fate of the tiniest survivors, some of whom lost their parents, others of whom were in one of Haiti's many orphanages already in the midst of ongoing adoption procedures abroad...

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/305524,aid-trickles-to-haiti-countryside-after-quake-of-the-century.html.