There is no help. We need food and water. Urgently
Posted on 25 januari 2010 by Neo Xirtam in Goede doelen
In front of the presidential palace, its roof folded in like a collapsed soufflé, Marcellus Samuel, a Haitian preacher, grabs my notebook and scribbles frantically on to the page.
“There is no help. Everybody is sleeping in the streets. We need food, water and clothes,” he writes. “URGENTLY!”
Around him, hundreds of Haitians left homeless by the recent earthquake crowd into a rag-tag refugee camp cobbled together from black tarpaulins, filthy carpets and branches, and erected in the square in front of the palace’s wreckage.
Even before the earthquake, life was seldom easy in the slums of Port-au-Prince, some of the poorest areas of the poorest country in the Americas. World Bank statistics show that life expectancy here is 57, against an average of 69 in Latin and Central America. More than 80% of the population of Haiti survives on less than the equivalent of £2 a day, while HIV and unemployment rates are staggeringly high.
The latest catastrophe, however, has taken the city to a new level of hellishness.
Perhaps nowhere are the scenes more ghoulish than in Bel-Air, a dirt-poor hillside slum that was one of the areas worst hit by the quake. Virtually every building here has been reduced to a mangle of iron and concrete; electricity cables dangle over the debris like dishevelled dreadlocks. The stench of putrefying flesh is so strong that rescue workers and journalists wear surgical masks or smear Vicks VapoRub into their nostrils. Locals clutch pieces of orange peel or tatty facecloths to their noses in order to fight off the smell.
On Boulevard JJ Dessalines, one of the neighbourhood’s main thoroughfares, the maggot-infested corpse of a man lies on the pavement, his feet bound together with a piece of rope. “He’s a crook so they killed him,” explains Sergeant Felipe de Bastos, a Brazilian soldier, who was patrolling the area.
“It looks like a stoning. His face is pretty deformed,” said the UN soldier, adding: “It might have been the population – or the local police.”
If Port-au-Prince’s streets now resemble a set from a Hollywood action movie, its hospitals are something straight out of a horror film. Step through the iron gates of the capital’s main public hospital – the Hôpital de l’Université, or HUEH – and you are confronted with the sight of about 1,500 earthquake victims crowded into an improvised emergency ward in the hospital’s car park.
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