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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Search gains desperate edge as chaos reins in the streets

By: Ben Fox and Vivian Sequera

Posted: 01/26/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

PAUL JEFFREY / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Enlarge Image

Haitians try to dig through concrete where they believe 20 people are buried in the Nerette area of Petionville, Haiti.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- In what's left of one family's home, in what remains of one destroyed neighbourhood, Jean-Rene Lochard has retrieved the bodies of his mother, brother, sister-in-law and nephew, and buried them beside the ruins, one by one and with a priest's blessing.

On Monday, he dug deeper, searching for his brother's five-year-old son. Only when he finds the boy will he rest.

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"I need the body to bury him," he said. "It's important to bury the bodies."

With 150,000 bodies already in mass graves, international teams, grieving families, sympathetic neighbours and sometimes even strangers were pulling at the rubble with tools or bare hands in countless corners of this devastated city. Thirteen days after the killer earthquake, they were desperate to recover some of the thousands of Port-au-Prince's lost dead -- to close each tragic circle, to lay loved ones in the earth to rest in peace.

For the living -- the homeless spread across empty lots, parks and plazas in the hundreds of thousands -- there was little rest as aid agencies struggled to fill their needs for food and water, and to get them tents to shelter their families against the burning tropical sun.

In front of the wrecked National Palace, people's desperation boiled over. Uruguayan UN peacekeepers had to fire pepper spray into the air to try to disperse thousands jostling for food.

The overwhelmed soldiers finally retreated, and young men rushed forward to grab the bags of pinto beans and rice, emblazoned with the U.S. flag, pushing aside others -- including one pregnant woman who collapsed and was trampled.

Thousands of people are huddled nearby in the Champs de Mars plaza, many with nothing more than a plastic sheet to protect them from sun and rain.

"We live like dogs," said Espiegle Amilcar, 34. "We're sleeping, eating and going to the bathroom in the same place."

The global agency supplying tents said it already had 10,000 stored in Haiti and at least 30,000 more would be arriving. But, said the International Organization for Migration, "the supply is unlikely to address the extensive shelter needs." The group estimates 100,000 family-sized tents are needed; the UN says up to one million people need shelter.

Meanwhile, the Haitian government and international groups are preparing a more substantial tent city on Port-au-Prince's outskirts, the first of more than a half-dozen sites officials hope will shelter the displaced before the spring rains and summer hurricanes.

The home where Rochard, 42, is searching for his nephew is an enormous pile of cracked concrete and twisted metal bars.

"The contractors are going to come and smash everything else, so we want to find him first," Lochard, 42, said as he sat amid the remains of a family's life -- shoes, bits of clothing, a small red Elmo doll.

When the magnitude-7.0 quake struck on Jan. 12, Lochard recalled, "I was going crazy," because the house completely collapsed around him as he dashed outside. Eight of the 14 family members who lived there perished.

In other pitiful scenes across Port-au-Prince, family survivors clambered over and clawed at rubble in hopes of finding their loved ones. Others simply sat hopelessly. And some still held out hope of finding people alive, two days after the last such "miracle" rescue.

"There's still hope. We think that people could still be alive," Mexican search team chief Hector Mendez said outside the ruins of the Montana Hotel. But he acknowledged, "There are many, many bodies."

-- AP, with files from CP

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 26, 2010 A9

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