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More than 200 international medical relief groups have sent teams to help the people of Haiti after the devastating earthquake. Now, four weeks after the catastrophe, early spring rains threaten to cause landslides and bring about health problems in the makeshift camps where more than half a million people are living. And delivering aid in Haiti continues to be difficult, we get an update from the BBC’s Mike Wooldridge in Port-au-Prince.
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. There’s been much improvement of the delivery of aid to quake survivors in Haiti. Even so, basic necessities like food, water and shelter are in short supply. The United Nations is threatening to cut off the delivery of free medicine to Haitian hospitals caught charging patients for the drugs. Four weeks after the quake is also way past the time when anyone would hope to find any more survivors still alive in the rubble, but the news today in Haiti is about just such a case. The BBC’s Mike Woolridge is in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince. He says details about the most recent quake survivor remain sketchy and nearly impossible to verify, but he says experts suggest the man might indeed have spent almost four weeks trapped in the rubble.
MIKE WOOLRIDGE: Nobody would realistically have expected that other people might still emerge from the rubble but there always was that possibility where people have had some sort of life support. It has happened in one or two other disasters. But I think that whatever attention there may be for that now, really here the overwhelming mood is not really any hope of the possibility of further rescue stories or survival of that kind. It is so much focused. This is certainly true for all the people around me here right in the center of Port-au-Prince area that was hardest hit by the earthquake. It’s so much focused on still getting the most basic needs of food and water and above all, shelter over people’s heads.
WERMAN: So Mike you’re speaking to us from downtown Port-au-Prince. Tell us where you are right now and what you see around you.
WOOLRIDGE: I’m in a place called Champs de Mars. It is right opposite the Presidential Palace and of course it’s the damage to that white Presidential Palace with the domes on either end of it which collapsed down into the floor below one of those domes leans forward. The other one backwards. That’s where I am at the moment. This is the largest of the camps that sprung up all across this city after the earthquake, but there are several hundred of them all together. Around this particular place a mother I was just talking to a moment ago says her small child is now already experiencing diarrhea. That’s a real fear here. Over this last three, four hours here talking to lots of people, there is still a feeling that they are not getting certainly what they expected four weeks into virtually into this disaster, in the way of food. Most certainly not in the way of shelter. They’re begging for tents here. A lot of people here have erected themselves very simple dwellings of cotton sheets and maybe a plastic sheet for the roof, all this just strung up on poles. A few people have used corrugated iron. But they are saying that when the heavy rains come, and they’ll be expected in just a few weeks now, they’ll likely do the kind of damage that will give people no protection.
WERMAN: There must be somebody kind of in charge doing the triage of the priorities, whether it’s medical, food, shelter, rebuilding, jobs, education and whatnot. Who is taking care of that?
WOOLRIDGE: In this area, as I say since early morning here the only people we’ve met in any kind of authority, there’s no NGO’s at the moment here in this area. We’ve met somebody from a local committee whose job it is to try and keep order here, to try and make sure that some of these things are provided better. He was one who was expressing some of the greatest frustration, so much so that there’s just been a demonstration going past us here of women. They were holding up banners saying we need food, we need help, we need shelter. What they were particularly worried about as we talked to them and they were chanting about this as well, was getting those things in time to be able to give them better protection, better defenses against the heavy rain. They’re really worried about the outbreak of more disease.
WERMAN: And Mike, these women walking through downtown Port-au-Prince, Haitian President Rene Preval is in Ecuador for an aid summit. Who is listening to these women, their grievances?
WOOLRIDGE: They’re not at all sure that anybody is. That’s why they say they’re having to stage demonstrations of that kind, just to get some sort of attention. There’s been talk of moving people like this out of Port-au-Prince, probably quite some considerable distance to be able to accommodate them and give them better shelter. Some people I’ve spoken to here say they wouldn’t be against that if it was relatively temporary. But of course other people who very much want to get back to jobs here if they can, or find new jobs if the place where they work was destroyed in the earthquake there perhaps. And indeed, they’re saying they’d be quite reluctant to go. So they are asking for much more attention to be given already to what you might call the longer term as well.
WERMAN: The BBC’s Mike Woolridge in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince. Mike very good to hear from you, thank you.
WOOLRIDGE: Thank you.
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