Surviving Haitians Pray for 1,500 Killed by Jeanne; More Peacekeepers Sent To Stem Looting
GONAIVES, Haiti (AP) -- Haitians surrounded by the destruction of Tropical Storm Jeanne prayed for the 1,500 dead during church services Sunday and gave thanks their lives were spared, while the United Nations rushed more peacekeepers in to stem looting in the ravaged city of Gonaives.
Gen. Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira, the Brazilian Army commander in charge of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti, criticized the slow pace of relief reaching residents, many of whom aid officials say have not eaten in five days or more.
"The situation remains critical," he said in an interview with the official Agencia Brasil. "Even those who were not directly affected are going hungry without enough water and are suffering from a shortage of medicine and medical assistance because the government infrastructure was already weak and, after this tragedy, is virtually nonexistent."
Pereira said many people were suffering from diarrhea while others, many of them children, were contracting gangrene. Amputations were being performed under horrendous conditions, he said.
Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue said Saturday the storm that ravaged Haiti last week killed at least 1,500 people.
On Sunday, the civil defense agency's Abel Nazaire said more bodies were recovered from debris in Gonaives on Sunday, raising the number of confirmed dead to 1,330. Another 2,601 people were injured, and 1,056 are missing.
Nazaire acknowledged that many of the missing can be presumed dead _ washed out to sea or under the rubble of collapsed homes in areas still inaccessible.
Some 300,000 people are homeless from the storm, including about 200,000 in Gonaives, he said.
Latortue said the government was drawing up plans to evacuate some of the tens of thousands of homeless people to a tent camp. Some victims, fearing the spread of disease, said they would abandon the city, Haiti's third-largest with 250,000 residents.
Anne Poulsen of the U.N. World Food Program said relief agencies were working around the clock trying to get food to victims, even using donkeys and mules in the effort.
When trucks carrying 8 tons of food from Cap-Haitien _ the port to the north _ were blocked by mudslides, "we unloaded the food from trucks and put it on to donkeys and mules to reach localities ... where people had not eaten for a week," Poulsen said.
WFP and CARE International distributed 120 tons of food in the past three days _ enough to feed 48,000 families for one day, she said.
The director of the WFP Haiti operation, Guy Gavreau, said floods from Jeanne destroyed the rice and fruit harvest in the Artibonite, Haiti's breadbasket, "so now the country can't even feed itself without outside help."
Aid groups had been able to get food to only about 25,000 people last week _ 10 percent of Gonaives' population, Gavreau said.
Planeloads of aid have arrived in Port-au-Prince, the capital, but getting it to Gonaives is a nine-hour nightmare drive with the final leg of the route covered by a 4-foot-deep lake of mud littered with mired aid trucks.
A truck that managed to get through Sunday morning was looted by desperate residents. They threw out packets of water, sending children in the streets dodging other aid trucks to grab the precious loot.
Argentine soldiers finally shoved people screaming, "We're hungry!," back from the truck.
Some 140 Uruguayan soldiers were on their way to reinforce about 600 U.N. peacekeepers already in Gonaives, said Toussaint Kongo-Doudou, spokesman for the U.N. mission.
U.N. humanitarian relief coordinator Eric Mouillesarine said street gangs were mobbing relief workers to steal food aid and "there's nothing we can do."
Poulsen confirmed that a convoy of trucks carrying government relief supplies was held up Saturday on the outskirts of Gonaives by men armed with guns and machetes.
She said no WFP food had been looted because convoys are escorted by U.N. peacekeepers.
The president of Atlanta-based CARE USA humanitarian group, Peter D. Bell, said a long-term approach was needed in Haiti, where the storm's impact was worsened by the near-total deforestation to make charcoal for cooking. Valleys surrounding Gonaives were unable to hold the rain dumped during some 30 hours of pounding by Jeanne.
"The solution is for Haitians, regardless of their (political) party, to take a long-term approach to the social disaster in this country," Bell said. "Poverty is the underlying cause of this disaster, but poverty cannot be turned back unless you also look at the ecological" disaster.
Sunday dawned sunny and bright, a relief after Saturday thunderstorms drenched those living on sidewalks and on the rooftops of flooded homes.
At the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Charles Borromee, four people stood and prayed in the back, unwilling to venture into a disaster zone of overturned pews and trash caked with ankle-deep mud. Outside, a woman among hundreds sheltering at the church brushed her teeth and spat toothpaste into the debris.
A couple walked up, shoes newly waxed and shining, for Mass in a makeshift chapel.
"We don't have anything but we're doing our best," Joselyne Ashalus, 31, said in front of a classroom where she sleeps on the floor with eight other people. "After all this we have to be respectful and we have to thank God for saving us."
Ashalus' five children escaped from the floods that destroyed their home.
Ashalus braided one daughter's hair and decorated it with pink and white hair grips. Her other children stood nearby _ a baby with yellow iodine-soaked bandages on both legs, a girl with one on her ankle and a toddler covered in a rash.
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On the Net:
National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov
Weather Underground storm site: http://www.wunderground.com/tropical
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Associated Press reporters Michelle Faul and Amy Bracken contributed to this report.