Positive sentiments about Haiti's future survive the desperation of hunger, disease and death

The most shocking thing is to see bloated, decomposing bodies, still abandoned, six days after the earthquake, writes LARA MARLOWEin Port-au-Prince

IT DOESN’T take long in Port-au-Prince to learn to distinguish between differnt kinds of ruined buildings. Those split open to display the owners’ possessions give you a strange sense of voyeurism, as if one were looking at a soul. Some slant at curious angles, defying gravity by remaining standing. The most sinister, of course, are the millefeuille ruins that collapsed on all and sundry. When you approach them, it is best to cover your nose. There are human beings entombed inside them, and they reek of rotting flesh, a sour, nauseating smell that compels you to cover your face with your handkerchief.

But the most shocking thing is to see bloated, decomposing bodies, still abandoned, six days after the earthquake. Atop the pancaked ruins of the nursing school, next to the Port-au-Prince general hospital, a tangle of perhaps 15 female bodies is perched upon the rubble, half naked, limbs twisted, features horribly distorted. They must have been apprentice nurses, and as a rickety bulldozer approached the ruin yesterday afternoon, I wondered whether they would be burned or thrown into a mass grave like so many others.

When Marie-Rose Kaomel Koachi was buried with her young daughter on Saturday, friends and family vainly sought two coffins. “We finally found one coffin, but it wasn’t big enough for the two of them, so we wrapped the child in a sheet on top of the casket,” said Nelta Volmar, the dead woman’s god-daughter. “No matter how much money you have, you can’t find a coffin.

“You can’t find a priest or a pastor. There’s no room in the cemeteries. We buried them in the courtyard of Marie-Rose’s mother’s building.” The Caribbean Supermarket, the largest one in Haiti, has become a de facto monument to the earthquake.

Rescue workers from Florida have worked round the clock, with spotlights at night, in the hope of freeing more trapped people.

Hope is still permitted: the UN reported that 12 people were pulled live from ruins on Saturday, at least three more yesterday.

There’s a police line outside the supermarket, for despite the awful stench, onlookers flock to see the next Haitian Lazarus arise from the tomb. Some have relatives inside, but most are just curious and have nothing better to do.

Evins Francois (26) has spent every day since the earthquake outside the ruined Caribbean. His wife Fabiola (24) had gone to the supermarket to buy meat for their dinner on Tuesday. “I think she could still be alive,” he said clutching at the tiniest shred of hope. “When I dial her cellphone number, sometimes it rings. If her phone survived, perhaps she did. She could be in a pocket where there is food and water.”

Evins’ mother-in-law, Armelle Deyé (52), made the five-hour journey from her farm at Les Cayes to join the vigil. When Evins and I speak of the possibility of Fabiola’s death, she recedes into the crowd to hide her tears.

Magali Rigaud, the head of logistics at the Haitian office of Catholic Relief Services, was calling her daughter to ask which brand of cat food to buy when the Caribbean collapsed on her and her twin boys. “I was determined not to be afraid. I didn’t want to panic,” she recalls.

Five other people were trapped with Rigaud and her boys in the pet food aisle. One had a flashlight. “We were saved by the dry dog food,” Rigaud laughs. “It broke the fall of the concrete, and made a little tunnel for us.”

Haiti now seems to hover between life and death, between the faultlines that continue to generate aftershocks, and a desire to move from emergency to recovery. Though relief aid is only beginning to trickle in, the ti-marchands have returned to the pavements, offering charcoal, coconuts, bananas, sweet potatoes, chewing gum and soft drinks. There was something particularly shocking about seeing a man hawking sodas out of a cooler a few tens of metres from the nurses’ bodies in the rue Guillou.

Shocking too, especially for Haitians, to see thousands of homeless people camping in front of the ruined presidential palace, the flagpoles, which still fly the Haitian emblem, used as anchors for clothes lines and tarpaulins.

Refugees yesterday scorned the UN peacekeepers – who long ago earned a reputation here (perhaps undeserved) as goat thieves – as tourists posing for photographs in front of the palace.

Then the rest of the convoy arrived, a Bolivian unit, accompanying a lorry from the Dominican Republic. “We have thousands of ready-meals,” a Dominican official told me. “Everyone will get some.”

Fears of riots have delayed distribution of food aid. I followed the quiet, orderly queue that snaked around the lorries, along the green wrought-iron grille of the palace, to the end, where Bolivian soldiers wearing plastic gloves and surgical masks handed three 10oz packets of pure water to each Haitian. Water; not food.

“We thought it was food. We need food too. I’m hungry,” I heard muttered as people walked away. “If there’s a country that wants to give us food, they shouldn’t give it to our president and government, because they’ll give it to their families and stock the rest and sell it, and the people won’t get any of it. They are thieves,” said Ronald Joseph (22), a painter and hairdresser. “If people cannot eat, there will be a revolution.” We stood just metres from the statue of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the father of Haiti’s 18th-century revolution against the French. Blanchard Élysée, a hot-blooded young man wearing a Dolce Gabbana T-shirt studded with rhinestones, said he and his friends have planned their revolution. “After this catastrophe, we have no confidence in any Haitian government. We’re giving the government 72 hours to make us an American protectorate.”

Cries of “America” and “Obama” shot up around us, on the crowded esplanade. Two young men raised clenched fists and shouted, “Che Guevara”. Another said “American and France!” and made a kissing sound.

If there is a glimmer of hope to be found in Haiti’s latest catastrophe, it is an oft-expressed feeling that a new start could grow from the rubble of the earthquake. Msgr Pierre Dumas, the auxiliary to Archbishop Miot, who died in the earthquake, quoted the Book of Job and the story of the tower of Galilee, in the Gospel, in an attempt to convince me that “God allows us to grow from suffering. We can grow in humanity. We can try to improve our solidarity. It won’t be the same Haiti. Because we have nothing, we can share what we have.”

Patrick Moynihan, an Irish-American former commodities trader who has run a school here for Haitian teenagers for the past 13 years, believes the country will learn practical lessons. “Maybe we have to build better. We must learn from this experience.” To my surprise, these sentiments were shared by at least some of the hot, tired, wounded and hungry masses on the Champs de Mars. Could Haiti really be better after the earthquake? I asked. Nou Kwè sa, they answered in unison. We believe that.