With food, cash and medicine starting to flow, Haiti's government and aid workers are turning to the mammoth task of feeding and sheltering hundreds of thousands of earthquake survivors still living in the capital's rubble-strewn streets and filthy tent cities.
As many as 1.5 million Haitians were made homeless by the earthquake that hit the country on January 12th and devastated its capital of Port-au-Prince. They need food and water and many require medical care. Raw from aftershocks, some remain too traumatised to sleep under a roof.
US troop have begun giving away 50,000 solar- and crank-powered radios to help displaced Haitians receive news and public service announcements. The units also have lights and cellphone chargers.
Haiti's government said yesterday 400,000 survivors would be moved to new villages to be built outside the ravaged coastal city, where the homeless huddle, cook and sleep amid decaying corpses and mounds of garbage.
Interior Minister Paul Antoine Bien-Aime said the first wave would move 100,000 refugees to tent villages of 10,000 each near the town of Croix Des Bouquets northeast of the capital. Aid and food is moving into Port-au-Prince, but many still lack basic necessities 10 days after the magnitude 7 quake battered the Western Hemisphere's poorest country and killed up to 200,000 people.
"We need shelter, showers. We don't have food or water. When it rains we have a lot of problems," said Iswick Theophin, a student who was living in one of the makeshift shelters carpeting the grounds of the city's golf course.
US Navy helicopters ferried in boxes of water to distribute to Haitians lining behind cordons for two bottles each at the camp, one of several set up in the wrecked capital.
American actor Sean Penn stopped by the golf course camp today to deliver antibiotics, painkillers and water filters. "The whole city has collapsed," he said.
Elsewhere, hundreds of hungry people swarmed a US military truck handing out food and water to Haitians camped on a soccer field. "This is crazy,” said Captain Sean Shields. “We just can't do it with what we got ... the mob wins."
More than 13,000 US military personnel are in Haiti and on 20 ships offshore, flying in supplies, evacuating the seriously wounded and protecting aid distribution points.
But for many people, life remained precarious.
The United Nations counted nearly 450 homeless encampments in Port-au-Prince alone and urged the government to begin consolidating them to streamline food distribution.
The focus turned to the business of living as rescuers wound down more than a week of searching for trapped survivors of last week's quake.
Small grocery shops and barber shops, as well as some pharmacies, began to open in Port-au-Prince, some extending credit to regular customers short of cash. Banking services were to resume over the weekend, giving most Haitians their first access to cash since the quake hit.
The World Bank said it will waive payments on Haiti's $38 million debt for the next five years, while the IMF said its proposed $100 million loan for Haiti would be interest-free until late 2011 to help the country rebuild.
China offered more aid in the form of an extra $2.6 million in cash, on top of $4.4 million given in emergency supplies.
The United Nations is adding 2,000 troops and 1,500 police to its 9,000-member peacekeeping mission in Haiti.
The seaport in the capital Port-au-Prince had been repaired enough to reopen for limited aid shipments, while airstrips outside Haiti's capital and in the Dominican Republic were opened for relief flights.