AFTER THE terror of the earthquake and the first 10 days of survival, the time of queuing has come to Haiti.
Thousands queued yesterday for cash, for exit from the country, for food, water and medical assistance.
Queuing is not an orderly process here. Several hundred people crowded around the Unitransfer office in Petionville early yesterday, in the hope of receiving remittances from relatives in the US, Canada and Europe. It was the first day since the January 12th earthquake which killed some 200,000 people and rendered two million homeless that financial institutions re-opened.
Further down the hill, there were queues at the Caribe Tours bus office for passage to the neighbouring Dominican Republic, and queues at the passport office.
The daily crowd had formed outside the French ambassador’s residence – Haitians with dual nationality were trying to return to France.
At Toussaint Louverture International Airport, officials from US development agency USAid stopped putting Haitian-Americans on relief flights returning empty to the US, because they could not manage the crowds.
Members of the US 82nd Airborne Division have been assigned to manage the queue outside the Port-au-Prince General Hospital downtown. When this correspondent, along with the Irish Times photographer and interpreter, showed up for an appointment to interview doctors, a US soldier told us to join the hours-long queue. An officer relented, and let us duck under a barrier. It nearly started a riot, as a half-dozen Haitians followed our example.
The 82nd Airborne had to abandon food distribution on a soccer field when 1,000 Haitians swarmed their lorry.
Several orphanages have been raided by people desperate for food, water and medicine.
Earthquake survivors armed with sticks stole 50 tonnes of rice, oil, dried beans and salt from a warehouse in the Carrefour district.
USAid reported that 200,000 people have already fled Port-au-Prince. Yesterday, I saw men pile furniture from a badly damaged house on to a truckbed, and several lorries loaded down with mattresses and suitcases.
Despite the vibrancy of open-air markets, and the first re-opening of a large supermarket, the Big Star in Petionville, the fallen buildings of Port-au-Prince are tombstones, the city a giant cemetery.
Every day, Haitians ask if they can work for me. Jimmy, the hotel’s breakfast waiter, handed me a note saying “I need some help to be survived.”
A corpse had burned overnight, on the Pan-American road. The upper torso seemed to lean forward onto the elbows, and the skull faced down the hillside. A tyre had been used to burn it. The steel reinforcement wires hung on the blackened bones like a necklace, beneath a sign saying “Salon de Beauté”.
The outpouring of international solidarity with Haiti continues.
US actor Sean Penn yesterday handed out antibiotics, painkillers and water filters in Port-au-Prince. Last night, CNN and some 25 television networks were to broadcast Hope for Haiti, with the participation of George Clooney, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Meryl Streep, Bill Clinton and others.
Peter Power, Ireland’s Minister of State for Overseas Development, has paid tribute to the “extraordinary generosity” of the Irish public towards Haiti, despite the recession.
The Irish Government has committed €3 million in aid to the Haitian relief effort.
Two Irish members of the Government-run Irish Rapid Response Corps, Donal McGrath from Co Wicklow and John Jeffries from C. Cork, communications and electrical experts respectively, have been deployed to help the World Food Programme establish its food pipeline from the Dominican Republic.
An unknown number of Irish volunteers are coming to Haiti. They include Dr Jude McSharry from Blanchardstown, who will work for two weeks with the Missionaries of Charity, and Dr Michael Sweeny from Sligo General Hospital, who is to join Goal here.