Relief Workers: Haiti’s Violence Threatens Storm’s Survivors
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GONAIVES, HAITI – Political violence erupting in Haiti’s capital threatened urgently needed food delivery yesterday, and aid officials warned that more than half the 250,000 people in the flood-devastated city of Gonaives remain hungry nearly three weeks after Tropical Storm Jeanne thundered through.
Nearly 2,500 tons of food is blocked in port because customs agents and dock loaders cannot report to work in the capital, Port-au-Prince, relief workers said.
“This threatens to paralyze all the humanitarian efforts we have in Gonaives. It’s extremely serious,” Anne Poulsen, of the U.N. World Food Program, said. “No one can afford to leave people in Gonaives without food even for a day or two.”
Yesterday, children tossed bread from the back of a truck to Gonaives storm survivors, who negotiated slippery, mud-mired roads to grab the plastic-wrapped loaves.
Hundreds lined up for aid at U.N. food centers, but thousands of people – too weak, sick, or frail from age – can’t get to food. The International Federation of Red Crescent and Red Cross Societies warned that well over 100,000 remain hungry. Some food is looted before it gets to distribution points, and some people are robbed of their rations by the street gangsters for which Gonaives is infamous.
Yesterday morning, a group of young men armed with rocks and metal bars blocked the road and jumped on four trucks leaving a warehouse with the largest food stocks in Gonaives. The attackers let the trucks go after discovering they were empty.
Saint Amise Dorcelue said she has tried four times to get food for herself and her five boys. Six-months pregnant, Ms. Dorcelue was left penniless after her husband died when his fishing boat was thrown out to sea during the storm.
Ms. Dorcelue and two of her boys sat on the dock in Gonaives’s shipping port, trying to fish with some old fishing line wrapped around a used shampoo bottle. If she catches enough tiny shad fish, she can sell them in the market to buy rice and corn.
“Sometimes we have food, sometimes we don’t,” she shrugged, resigned to the misery that has become commonplace in Haiti, a nation of 8 million where political turmoil and greed turns natural disasters into catastrophe.
The death toll stood at 1,870 bodies recovered with another 884 people reported missing and most presumed dead.