Aid trickles to Haiti countryside after quake of the century

Jan 24, 2010, 19:12 GMT

Port-au-Prince - Aid this weekend started trickling through to outlying towns crushed by the recent Haitian earthquake, which is now officially one of the worst of the past 100 years as the government confirmed a death toll of at least 112,000.

In Leogane, about 40 kilometres west of Port-au-Prince, hundreds of women waited in 30-degree-Celsius temperatures for food coming from various German and other aid organizations.

Doctors from Japan, Canada and Germany have already arrived here, but the first food aid was being distributed on Saturday and Sunday. The town of 120,000 was nearly leveled by the quake.

Although the search for survivors has been formally ended by the Haitian government, there were still miracles: A French team on Saturday, 11 days after the 7.0-magnitude quake leveled the capital Port-au-Prince, pulled a 24-year-old man from the rubble of a hotel.

To date, dozens of international rescue teams have extracted 133 survivors from destroyed buildings, a difficult task made even more dangerous by a steady stream of aftershocks. Haitians have also rescued an untold number of friends, families and strangers from the wreckage, using bare hands and primitive tools.

An estimated 609,000 people around the capital city alone are homeless, the International Organization for Migration reported in Geneva. IOM spokesperson Jean-Philippe Chauzy said Sunday in Geneva that tents are urgently needed. Meanwhile, more than 130,000 people have, at the urging of the Haitian government, migrated to the relatively undamaged north and west of the country.

The high-powered Hope for Haiti telethon raised 58 million dollars from the US and elsewhere for earthquake relief in the first 24 hours since the event, organizers announced. The Friday night television broadcast featured more than 100 top stars from film, television and music and was seen worldwide.

The total does not include corporate donations, large private donors or iTunes downloads of music from the Hope for Haiti show. Organizers said that the album was the top music download on Saturday in 18 countries.

The Haitian government was coming back to life. Haitian Information Minister Marie Laurence Joselin Lassegue has set up operations on a camp table behind a crooked wall left standing after the January 12 disaster. Her open-air workplace is near the police station at the airport, where the remains of the government are working. She has seven workers sharing two laptops.

Lassegue said there are 329 refugee camps. 'We are sending medical aid to those points. That is our current strategy.'

Concern was on the rise about the fate of the tiniest survivors, some of whom lost their parents, others of whom were in one of Haiti's many orphanages already in the midst of ongoing adoption procedures abroad.

Lassegue told the German Press Agency dpa that the government has put a halt to new adoptions. Only those children who were already in the midst of adoptions would be allowed to leave. There have been increasing reports from the UN and elsewhere over trafficking in the disaster's smallest victims, who have been found wandering on their own through the country.

European Union foreign ministers are set to meet Monday to discuss a common stance on long-term development aid for quake-stricken Haiti in advance of an international donor conference scheduled for March. The United Nations has requested a contribution of 400 police officers, primarily from France since French is a major language of Haiti.

Across the Atlantic on Monday, officials from 20 nations are set to meet in Montreal to lay plans for coordinating aid to quake- stricken Haiti. US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner are among those planning to attend.

Delegates from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Mexico, Costa Rica, Spain, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Japan are also expected at the Friends of Haiti meeting.

Haiti's death toll could reach 200,000, international officials have anticipated.

The confirmed death toll of 112,000 already makes the Haiti quake one of the worst in 100 years. The Tangshan, China, quake in 1976 is thought to have killed 242,000 to 655,000, the highest death toll recorded in 100 years. Death tolls of 200,000 to 230,000 have been recorded in Kansu, China (1920), Tokyo (1923), Xining, China (1927) and Sumatra, Indonesia (2004).

Haiti, with 112,000, appeared to be about sixth in the macabre list.