Haitians desperate for supplies

PORT-AU-PRINCE: Drumbeats called the faithful to a Sunday Mass behind mounds of rubble and amid the few remaining walls of Port-au-Prince’s destroyed Roman Catholic cathedral to listen to a sermon in a scene resembling the Apocalypse.

“Why give thanks to God? Because we are here,” said the Rev. Eric Toussaint. “We say ’Thank you God.’ What happened is the will of God. We are in the hands of God now.”

As Rev. Toussaint preached to a small crowd of survivors amid the ruins, rescuers across the capital were still struggling to pull an increasingly slim number of living from collapsed buildings amid the stench of death. Hundreds of thousands waited for food and water to finally reach them, five days after Tuesday’s magnitude-7.0 earthquake.

Frustration grew over efforts to get aid through the small, damaged and clogged airport that has been taken over by U.S. military controllers, and to get it from the airport into town.

Doctors Without Borders said on Sunday that a cargo plane carrying a field hospital was denied permission to land at the airport and had to be rerouted through the Dominican Republic — creating a 24-hour delay in setting up a crucial field hospital.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called the quake “one of the most serious crises in decades.”

“The damage, destruction and loss of life are just overwhelming,” he said before flying toward Haiti on Sunday.

Nobody knows how many died in Tuesday’s quake. Haiti’s government alone has already recovered 20,000 bodies — not counting those recovered by independent agencies or relatives themselves, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told The Associated Press.

Amid the struggle for food, some turned to looting, infuriating people struggling to guard what little they still have. Residents in the Delmas neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince caught two suspected looters, tied them together, beat them and dragged them through the streets.

One lay completely motionless, his dreadlocked hair stained by a deep pool of dark crimson blood. The other lay bleeding profusely but occasionally twitched his leg.

An American team pulled a woman alive from a collapsed university building where she had been trapped for 97 hours. Another crew got water to three survivors whose shouts could be heard deep in the pancaked ruins of a supermarket.

And a woman was pulled alive, dehydrated but otherwise uninjured, from the ruins of the Montana Hotel, to the applause of onlookers.

The son of co-owner Nadine Cardoso said he could hear her voice from the rubble. Twelve hours later, she was lowered from a hill of debris on a stretcher.

“It’s a little miracle,” her husband, Reinhard Riedl, said after hearing she was alive in the wreckage. “She’s one tough cookie. She is indestructible.” — AP