EYEWITNESS:One aid worker is travelling overland to Port-au-Prince to take possession of plane loads of bodybags, writes LARA MARLOWE
IT IS a measure of what Barack Obama called “the common humanity we all share” that international relief workers and journalists are flocking to Haiti in their thousands in the wake of Tuesday’s earthquake.
Access to the beleaguered capital, Port-au-Prince, is difficult, with commercial flights suspended. The long road to Port-au-Prince starts in Santo Domingo in the neighbouring Dominican Republic.
In the immigration queue at the airport, I met a Dutchman from the Adra aid agency, who is travelling overland to Port-au-Prince to take possession of plane loads of bodybags to begin the grim work of burying the dead, widely believed to number in the tens of thousands.
With corpses decomposing in the sun, Haitians have taken the matter into their own hands, ferrying bodies north to a place called Cabaret.
The US evangelist Pat Robertson enraged aid workers by saying on television this week that Haiti has suffered this calamity because it “made a pact with the devil” to drive the French out in 1791.
There were reports of Haitians breaking into old crypts and tombs to stuff bodies into them, of corpses immolated on pyres of burning tyres.
“Unfortunately, a lot of people are going to be buried without being identified or counted,” said Bill Canny, the head of emergency operations for Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the US member of the international Caritas federation.
With the help of Trócaire, which is channelling its donations for the relief effort through CRS/Caritas, I embarked with Canny and experts from Germany and Guatemala on the seven-hour journey in a Toyota pick-up truck.
We stopped at a supermarket at the town of Bani to stock up on mineral water, biscuits, dried fruit and nuts. There would be nothing to eat in the capital, we were warned.
Canny works his iPhone for much of the journey and shows me a plaintive message he has just received from a Jean-François Dujour in Leogane, 32km west of Port-au-Prince.
“Leogane was also destroyed,” Dujour writes. “So many people died and continue dying because there is no care for anyone. We are managing everything ourselves. We continue taking out debris, the houses are destroyed and dead people stinking. We will still face hunger.”
“We need to get people out to Leogane and Jacmel, these outlying communities,” Canny says.
One of my travelling companions shares a memo circulated among aid agencies. It warns that the “security situation has the potential to deteriorate quickly”. The memo lists primary risks to personnel as “aftershocks and mudslides, burglars/muggings, carjackings, road banditry, traffic accidents, looting of relief supplies, assault by desperate beneficiaries, violent demonstrations, kidnappings”.
Canny, a veteran of three decades of disaster relief work, was CRS’s representative in Haiti from 2006 until 2009. In 2007 and 2008, five of his staff were kidnapped.
CRS was the lead food distributor in the capital during the 2008 hurricane crisis. Serge Miop, the archbishop of Port-au-Prince, was the head of Caritas there. He was killed in the earthquake on Tuesday.
“He was a quiet, reflective man but at the same time a man of action and a friend of the downtrodden,” says Canny. “His death leaves a void in pastoral leadership as in the parish infrastructure.”
CRS/Caritas’s 150 local staff are beginning to return to work. Six expatriates had arrived in the capital by yesterday. Today, they will number a dozen. CRS yesterday began transporting food into Haiti by road. At their warehouse in Santo Domingo, I saw hundreds of kits lined up for transport. Each kit costs $40 and contains mineral water, sausages, peanut butter, crackers, sardines, baby nappies in a five- gallon plastic bucket. It is meant to sustain a family of five for two days.
A history of instability and natural disasters endowed Haiti with a large humanitarian aid community. They began meeting in “clusters” or “pillars of response”, concentrating on water and sanitation, food and logistics before the earthquake. These groups now advocate setting up tented camps for the 200,000 people in Port-au-Prince whose homes have been destroyed, according to an estimate issued by the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs.