Hunger and hope in Haiti

[cali]

By ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU and MIKE MELIA

The Associated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Precious water, food and early glimmers of hope began reaching parched and hungry earthquake survivors Saturday on the streets of this shattered city, where despair at times turned into a frenzy among the ruins.


"People are so desperate for food that they are going crazy," said accountant Henry Oun-che, in a crowd of hundreds who fought one another as U.S. military helicopters clattered overhead carrying aid.

When other Navy choppers dropped rations and Gatorade into a soccer stadium thronged with refugees, 200 youths began brawling and throwing stones to get at the supplies.

Across the hilly, steamy city, where people choked on the stench of death, hope faded by the hour for finding many more victims alive in the rubble, four days after Tuesday's catastrophic earthquake.

Still, here and there, the murmur of buried victims spurred rescue crews on, even as aftershocks threatened to finish off crumbling buildings.

"No one's alive in there," a woman sobbed outside the wrecked Montana Hotel. But hope wouldn't die. "We can hear a survivor," search crew chief Alexander Luque of Namibia later reported. His men dug on. Elsewhere, an American team pulled a woman alive from a collapsed university building where she had been trapped for 97 hours.

Nobody knew how many were dead. Haiti's government alone already has recovered 20,000 bodies -- not counting those recovered by independent agencies or relatives themselves, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told the Associated Press.

In a fresh estimate, the Pan American Health Organization said 50,000 to 100,000 people perished in the quake. Bellerive said 100,000 would "seem to be the minimum." Truckloads of corpses were being trundled to mass graves.

A U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman declared the quake the worst disaster the international organization has ever faced, since so much government and U.N. capacity in the country was demolished. In that way, Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva, it's worse than the cataclysmic Asian tsunami of 2004: "Everything is damaged."

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http://www.thehawkeye.com/ss/petidol/

[fishnfla]

1. the montana hotel is where our friends daughter is

i cant open the link what is date of article?

[cali]

2. it's within the last 2 hours.

holding good thoughts for your friend's daughter- and all those still alive and trapped in the rubble.

[BeFree]

3. Now

Now that emergency supplies are being delivered most of the heat is off the bureaucrats.

The next step will be shelter for those whose homes are rubble. Tents? What?

Seems to be there is plenty of open land outside of the cities. Who owns that land? Read here that 1% of the people own 99% of the land. If true, that needs to change.

Haiti has a chance to reform and in due time become a better place.
I wonder if American politics is up to the task of reforming its approach to Haiti?