Tuesday a man trapped in the rubble of a building during an aftershock is pulled out alive 12 days later, dehydrated with a broken leg but expected to survive. Wednesday a teenage girl is reportedly rescued from rubble 15 days after the quake. Each new live find gives hope to relatives that their missing loved one might too be saved.
Tent camps are now being planned for at least 400,000 of Port-au-Prince’s newly homeless. They’ll be built outside the city but construction on at least one of them is barely underway and most likely won’t be finished until sometime next week.
In the meantime conditions in the temporary camps that have sprouted up across the Capitol are increasingly awful and unsanitary, with trash and human waste piling up. In some cases dead bodies lie rotting in close proximity to where people are living outside.
Obstacles continue to slow aid deliveries. There is a backlog of 800 to 1000 planes waiting to land, loaded with relief supplies. The airport can only handle about 130 flights a day. The U-N is asking for small trucks to be brought in to help move the food, water, medicine and other supplies from the airport to distribution points because the streets are extremely difficult to navigate. They’re not wide, traffic is thick and many roads are still blocked by boulders and debris. It can take an hour to drive a few miles. Estimates are two million people need food but only about 500,000 have gotten any, some of which was daily rations.
Haitian-American troops with a U.S. Military Joint Task Force Civil Affairs Team are now going into some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods to help assess needs. The troops with roots here say they have greater access to the people who trust them more and give them a better understanding of what the most pressing issues are. The Team is identifying local leaders who can help insure when aid finally arrives it’s distributed fairly and not just grabbed by the strongest in the crowd.
Meanwhile there are reports of children disappearing from hospitals where many have no ID and no one to claim them. Haiti had 380,000 orphans before the quake. By some estimates the number has tripled because of parents killed in the disaster. Charitable groups including “Save the Children” are trying to establish safe havens for some of the kids but can’t handle or account for them all.