Haiti's mass graves swell, doctors fear more death

By PAUL HAVEN and MIKE MELIA Associated Press Writers

Jan 21, 2010, 2:26 PM EST

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) --

Workers are carving out mass graves on a hillside north of Haiti's capital, using earth-movers to bury 10,000 people in a single day even as relief workers warn that Haitians are still dying of injuries from the Jan. 12 quake for lack of medical care.

Clinics have 12-day waiting lists for patients, untreated injuries are festering and makeshift camps that have sprung up in parks, streets and vacant lots now house an estimated 500,000 people, many in need of food, water and a doctor.

"The next health risk could include outbreaks of diarrhea, respiratory tract infections and other diseases among hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in overcrowded camps with poor or nonexistent sanitation," said Dr. Greg Elder, deputy operations manager for Doctors Without Borders in Haiti.

The death toll is estimated at 200,000, according to Haitian government figures relayed by the European Commission, with 80,000 buried in mass graves. The commission now estimates 2 million homeless.

Getting help in is still a challenge. Gen. Douglas Fraser, head of the U.S. Southern Command running Haiti's airports said Thursday that 1,400 flights are on a waiting list for slots at the Port-au-Prince airport that can handle 120 to 140 flights a day.

At least 51 sizable aftershocks have jolted the city, sending nervous Haitians fleeing repeatedly into the streets - and keeping many sleeping in the open. Quakes of magnitude 4.9 and 4.8 followed in quick succession just before noon Thursday, prompted rescue crews to briefly abandon work on precarious, ruined buildings, though there were no reports of casualties or damage.

They followed a magnitude-5.9 temblor a day earlier that collapsed some structures.

In the sparsely populated wasteland of Titanyen, north of Port-au-Prince, burial workers said the macabre task of handling the never-ending flow of bodies was traumatizing.

"I have seen so many children, so many children. I cannot sleep at night and, if I do, it is a constant nightmare," said Foultone Fequiert, 38, his face covered with a T-shirt against the overwhelming stench.

The dead stick out at all angles from the mass graves - tall mounds of chalky dirt, the limbs of men, women and children frozen together in death. "I received 10,000 bodies yesterday alone," said Fequiert.

Workers say they have no time to give the dead proper religious burials or follow pleas from the international community that bodies be buried in shallow graves from which loved ones might eventually retrieve them.

"We just dump them in, and fill it up," said Luckner Clerzier, 39, who was helping guide trucks to another grave site farther up the road.

An Associated Press reporter counted 15 burial mounds at Clerzier's site, each covering a wide trench cut into the ground some 25 feet (8 meters) deep, and rising 15 feet (4.5 meters) into the air. At the larger mass grave, where Fequiert toiled, three earth-moving machines cut long trenches into the earth, readying them for more cadavers.

Others struggle to stem the flow of the dead, even as time is running out even for miracles among the ruins.

More than eight days after the magnitude-7.0 earthquake, the Los Angeles-based International Medical Corps said relatives found a 5-year-old in the wreckage of his home.

And rescue teams were chasing tantalizing hints.

A Los Angeles County rescue team sent three dogs separately into the rubble on a street corner in Petionville, overlooking Port-au-Prince. Each dog picked up the scent of life at one spot.

They screamed into the rubble in Creole: "If you hear me, bang three times."

They heard no response, but vowed to continue.

"It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and each day the needles are disappearing," team member Steven Chin said.

A team from Puerto Rico and Costa Rica on Thursday chased a report that a girl had been sending text messages from within the rubble of a university. Sonar and dogs indicated someone might still be alive, so they threw themselves into the hunt, said Jose Echevarria, spokesman for the Puerto Rico team.

A Dutch mercy flight carrying 106 children slated for adoption arrived in the Netherlands from Port-au-Prince on Thursday. Nearly all of the children, aged 6 months to 7 years, were in the process of being adopted and already had been matched to new Dutch parents before the quake.

At the Mission Baptiste hospital south of Port-au-Prince, patients waited on benches or rolling beds while doctors and nurses raced among them, X-rays in hand.

The hospital had just received badly need supplies from soldiers of the U.S Army's 82nd Airborne Division, but hospital director John Angus said there wasn't enough. He pleaded for more doctors, casts and metal plates to fix broken limbs.

U.N. peacekeepers and U.S. troops have been helping keep order around aid deliveries and clinics in the stricken city, which seemed relatively calm on Thursday, even if looters continued to pillage pockets of downtown.

Police stood by as people made off with food and mobile phones from shattered shops, saying they were trying to save stores that are still undamaged.

"It is not easy but we try to protect what we can," said officer Belimaire Laneau.

Young men with machetes fought over packages of baby diapers within sight of the body of a young woman who had been shot in the head. Witnesses said police had shot her, but officers in the vicinity denied it.

Meanwhile, a flotilla of rescue vessels led by the U.S. hospital ship Comfort has steamed into Port-au-Prince harbor to help fill gaps in the struggling global effort to deliver water, food and medical help.

Elder, of Doctors Without Borders, said that patients were dying of sepsis from untreated wounds and that some of the group's posts had 10- to 12-day backups of patients.

The U.S. Navy said it is working to add 350 more crew members to the hospital ship, quadrupling the number of beds aboard to 1,000 and increasing the number of operating rooms from six to 11.

At least 500,000 quake victims are living in 447 makeshift settlements scattered in parks, streets and vacant lots around Haiti's capital, according to the U.N.'s International Organization for Migration. Only three of the camps have access to drinkable water.

At United Nations headquarters in New York, U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes said it was believed 3 million people are affected. The Pan American Health Organization said Thursday that more than 300,000 people are reportedly living in about 280 makeshift settlements, mainly in parks and open spaces.

Joseph St. Juste and his 5-year-old daughter, Jessica, were among 50,000 people spending their nights at a golf course under shelters of bed sheets or cardboard boxes. He is afraid to stay in his home because of the aftershocks.

St. Juste, a 36-year-old bus driver, wakes up every day and goes out to find food and water for his daughter.

"I wake up for her," he said. "Life is hard anymore. I've got to get out of Haiti. There is no life in Haiti."

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Associated Press writers contributing to this report included Alfred de Montesquiou, Tamara Lush, Kevin Maurer, Michelle Faul, Bill Gorman and Jessica Desvarieux in Haiti; Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations; Pauline Jelinek in Washington; Mike Corder in Eindhoven, Netherlands; Emma Vandore and Elaine Ganley in Paris; and Aoife White in Brussels.

Haitian boy, girl pulled out of rubble eight days after deadly quake

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan. 20, 2010, (Xinhua) --

A boy and a girl Wednesday were rescued here from under the rubble of the Haitian quake.

A five-year-old boy's uncle pulled him out of rubble and took him to a local hospital, eight days after the devastating quake.

The uncle said he luckily discovered the boy in a small void under the rubble of a house, but the boy's father and mother were believed to have died.

The boy apparently had no other harm, except being severely dehydrated and dysphoric.

Meanwhile, an 11-year-old girl was pulled out from under the rubble by her neighbors.

The girl was being treated at the Lambert clinic. She lay on a bed in the clinic's corridor, occasionally crying out with nightmares.

"It truly is a miracle, she came back to life bit by bit. She is blessed by the God," said surgeon Dominique Jean.

Earlier Wednesday, a UN spokeswoman in Geneva said international teams had rescued 121 people from the debris of collapsed buildings.

A 6.1-magnitude aftershock, the most powerful of the over 40 significant ones since the Jan. 12 temblor, jolted Port-au-Prince at dawn of Wednesday.

Haiti's Civil Defense Department Tuesday said the quake had killed 75,000 people, injured 250,000 others and left 1 million homeless.

Haitian officials said the final death toll may reach between 100,000 to 200,000.

Editor: Zhang Xiang

Mexican aid efforts "extraordinary": Haitian official

MEXICO CITY, Jan. 20, 2010, (Xinhua) --

The efforts Mexico has made to aid quake-torn Haiti have been "extraordinary," a Haitian diplomatic official in Mexico said Wednesday.

"I would call the response from Mexicans extraordinary on several levels, from ordinary people and authorities to central and local government," said Moise Dorce, Minister-Counselor at the Haitian embassy in Mexico City, who is in charge of the aid work.

"There has been a very human response," Dorce told Xinhua. "People immediately realized how hard it is and are working to make things better."

Two trucks are loaded with donated goods daily. The streets outside the embassy, in the posh suburb Polanco, are stacked high with crates of donations: water, rice, beans, medicines, canned food, mattresses, diapers and toilet rolls.

Both Haitian and Mexican volunteers are busy filling trucks with goods, which will head down to the eastern port Veracruz and then be loaded onto the Mexican navy ship "Hausteco" that has carried 200 tons of aid to the Caribbean nation.

Embassy staff estimate the embassy alone has sent between 250 and 300 tons of aid to Veracruz, and there are many more collection points across the country.

The Constitution Square in central Mexico City is also packed with volunteers organized by the city government sending goods to Veracruz for shipping.

Dorce said Mexico's biggest telephone company Telmex had raised 10 million pesos (784,000 U.S. dollars) on the first day of an appeal for funds to send aid to Haiti, where officials say at least 75,000 people have died in the devastating quake.

Dorce said he was particularly proud to be in a nation that responded so quickly. "Mexico City's quake increased the sensibility of the population. It makes them understand more about what other people have experienced."

Mexico's Topos de Tlatelolco, a volunteer quake rescue team that travels across the world when a disaster strikes, flew immediately to Port-au-Prince once the quake struck Haiti last week.

But the crisis is not over. Food was running short and aid reached only a small number of Haitians, Dorce said.

Many people were sleeping on the streets fearing more aftershocks would occur after a powerful one hit the country on Wednesday morning, he said.

"We see the quantity of aid that arrives here, but the people in Haiti don't know. They just see they have nothing, and they are desperate," Dorce added.

The World Food Program estimates it is now feeding 200,000 people in Haiti. However, this remains short of what is needed.

Other UN bodies estimate as many as 3 million residents in Port-au- Prince and the surrounding cities are homeless and need assistance.

Needs remain varied. Embassy staff say they need urgent help from a logistics company to pack up donations. Tents are also urgently needed as many people stay in the streets and Haiti is prone to heavy rains.

Other staffers say the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine is the most important.

Editor: Zhang Xiang

UN hires Haitians to jumpstart economy

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 20, 2010, (Xinhua) --

As search and rescue operations shift gears to immediate assistance for the survivors, the UN Development Program (UNDP) announced on Wednesday that it will employ over 1,000 Haitians in an attempt to kickstart the economy.

"Time is of the essence in getting early recovery after a major disaster," said UNDP Administrator Helen Clark, who visited Haiti on Sunday.

By the end of the week, 1,100 Haitians will be paid about 5 U.S. dollars a day for work that includes removing rubble, doing street repairs and bringing essential infrastructure, such as electricity, back online.

The first phase of the cash-for-work program will focus on Carrefour-Feuilles, a neighborhood just south of the nation's capital, Port-au-Prince.

The initiative will soon be rolled out to other earthquake- stricken locations, including Leogane and Jacmel. Once fully operational, the project will employ 220,000 people, indirectly benefiting around 1 million Haitians, according to the UNDP.

Clark called for more donor support for the program, which has received 5 million U.S. dollars from the UNDP and the Spanish government.

"This will accelerate early recovery and prepare for the longer- term rebuilding when it takes place," said Clark.

Rebecca Grynspan, UNDP assistant administrator and director of the Regional Bureau of Latin America and the Caribbean, told reporters the cash-for-work program is essential because "people are able to be not only spectators, but actors" in relief efforts.

As part of the wider UN flash appeal for 550 million U.S. dollars, the UNDP has appealed for 36 million U.S. dollars to help Haitians recover from the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that hit on Jan. 12.

"The overall task of rebuilding a devastated capital -- with a population of this size -- is huge," said Clark.

Editor: Mu Xuequan