updated 1:26 p.m. ET Jan. 22, 2010
Hundreds of thousands flee Haiti’s capital
Survivors cram into buses, nearly swamp ferries and even escape on foot
Haitians shop at a supermarket in Port-au-Prince on Thursday.
The Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Haitians are fleeing their quake-ravaged capital by the hundreds of thousands, aid officials said Friday, as their government promised to help nearly a half-million more move from squalid camps on curbsides and vacant lots into safer, cleaner tent cities.
Aid officials said some 200,000 people have crammed into buses, nearly swamped ferries and set out even on foot to escape the ruined capital. For those who stay, foreign engineers have started leveling land on the fringes of the city for tent cities, supposedly temporary, that are meant to house 400,000 people.
The goal is to halt the spread of disease at hundreds of impromptu settlements that have no water and no place for sewage. Homeless families have erected tarps and tents, cardboard and scrap as shelter from the sun, but they will be useless once the summer rainy season hits.
The new camps "are going to be ... places where they will have at least some adequate facilities," Fritz Longchamp, chief of staff to President Rene Preval, told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Just as rescue crews began abandoning hope of finding survivors of the magnitude-7.0 quake on Jan. 12, workers pulled a 69-year-old woman from the rubble. A doctor treating her said she was in bad condition and may not survive.
"There is very little hope, but we are trying to save her life," Dr. Ernest Benjamin told The Associated Press. Doctors were treating the woman at Haiti's General Hospital after she was freed from the rubble Friday morning, giving her oxygen and intravenous fluids.
It was not clear exactly where she was freed, but doctors said it was near the capital's soccer stadium.
'A first move'
Armies of foreign aid donors, instead, turned their attention to expanding their pipeline of food, water and medical care for survivors.
With extensive swaths of Port-au-Prince in ruins, more than 500 makeshift settlements with a population of about 472,000 are now scattered around the capital, said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, spokesman for the U.N.'s International Organization for Migration.
Longchamp said he expects buses to start moving quake refugees to the first of the planned camps by the end of the month, but aid agencies were cautious about that timetable.
"These settlements cannot be built overnight. There are standards that have to be designed by experts. There is the leveling of the land, procurement and delivery of tents, as well as water and sanitation," said Vincent Houver, the IOM's mission chief in Haiti.
The move will be voluntary and temporary, according to Elisabeth Byrs, the spokeswoman for the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva.
"It's to help them in a first move. After, the people will decide if they want to stay," she said.
Many people are just trying to get out of the capital, often back to the farms or provincial homes of their parents or relatives.
The U.S. Agency for International Development said Friday that as many as 200,000 Haitians have fled the capital and many more are trying to do so.
Reverse migration
Computer teacher Daniel Dukenson walked across the capital and caught a bus to take his family from their collapsed home in a slum to crowd in with a cousin in the seaside town of St. Marc, a two-hour journey away.
Video: USNS Comfort soothes ailing quake victims
"I'd like to go back, but it's going to take a lot of time for Port-au-Prince to get back on its feet. Two years, maybe," the 28-year-old told The Associated Press by telephone. He said he hopes to make a living teaching English.
A USAID report suggests that at least 100,000 people have fled to Gonaives, a city of about 280,000 that itself is still recovering from back-to-back hurricanes in 2008.
The flight from Port-au-Prince is a reversal of decades of migration out of a countryside where deforestation and erosion have impoverished the land.
Still others have tried to flee abroad. The U.S. Embassy on Friday turned away hundreds of people seeking a trip out on the planes that have dropped off aid. Scores of U.S. citizens were given passes, but many were told officials were overwhelmed and they would have to return later.
Effort to 'flood the country with food'
Haiti's government estimates the Jan. 12 quake killed 200,000 people, as reported by the European Commission. It said 250,000 people were injured and 2 million homeless in the nation of 9 million. Others offer smaller estimates.
The disaster has prompted what the Red Cross calls the greatest deployment of emergency responders in its 91-year history. Nations around the world have offered what they can: more than $500 million from European nations, money even from impoverished Chad and Congo, and a ton of tea from Sri Lanka.
The U.N.'s World Food Program said it has distributed more than 1.4 million food rations — each with three meals, and has a fleet of trucks bringing food and supplies from the Dominican Republic.
"We are planning to flood the country with food," Myrta Kaulard, the agency's Haiti director, told the AP.
Patching up the pier
To speed that flood, the U.S. Army, Navy and Coast Guard are trying to patch up the Haitian capital's only functional industrial pier, which is key to getting in large aid shipments as well as to Haiti's long-term recovery.
Only four ships have been able to dock at the pier, where 15-inch-wide cracks make it risky to let more than one truck work at a time. The port's cranes are now destroyed or tip dangerously, and damage is so extensive that military officials say they don't know how long it will take before ships can dock and unload in large quantities.
"I wouldn't even ask my workers to risk it. I don't trust it," said Georges Jeager Junior, a businessman who plans to shift his port operations to Cap Haitien, the country's remote second city far to the north, at least 12 hours overland on horrendous roads from the capital. Jeager Junior said that means prices will soar.
Damage at another port are limiting fuel shipments. No tanker has been able to land since the quake at the country's badly damaged main oil terminal, on the edge of Haiti's most dangerous slum. That has forced gas stations to depend on tankers driving in from the neighboring Dominican Republic.
Gunfire erupts
On the waterfront Thursday, sporadic rounds of gunfire echoed from the nearby downtown commercial area. Scavengers continued to rampage through collapsed and burning shops even though U.S. troops were patrolling.
At a building in the Carrefour neighborhood, where the multi-faith Eagle Wings Foundation of West Palm Beach, Florida, planned to distribute food, stick-wielding quake victims from a nearby tent camp stormed the stores and made off with what the charity's Rev. Robert Nelson said were 50 tons of rice, oil, dried beans and salt. Fights broke out as others stole food from the looters.
At the south of Haiti's main bay, near the earthquake's epicenter, the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard set up a triage center amid the rusting motorboats, with dozens of military doctors treating the most urgent casualties on the lawn.
"The injured seem to just keep showing up," said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Chris Worth. "We've been working from dawn to dusk since getting here."
Emergency medical centers almost everywhere were swamped with patients critically injured by the quake. There were dire shortages of surgeons, nurses, medicines and medical tools.
Doctors said patients were dying of sepsis from untreated wounds.
"A large number of those coming here are having to have amputations, since their wounds are so infected," said Brynjulf Ystgaard, a Norwegian surgeon at a Red Cross field hospital.
© 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Kids forced into domestic servitude in Haiti
Moderator: doug
67 posts
• Page 2 of 5 • 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Hundreds of thousands flee Haiti?s capital
by doug » Fri Jan 22, 2010 3:33 pm
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
Haiti ends search for quake survivors
by doug » Sat Jan 23, 2010 7:27 am
updated 8:44 a.m. ET Jan. 23, 2010
Haiti ends search for quake survivors
Decision comes hours after two people were rescued from the rubble
Emmannuel Buso, 21, rests at a hospital in Port-au-Prince on Friday after being rescued from the rubble of a building where he was trapped for 10 days.
The Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Haiti's government has declared the search and rescue phase for survivors of the earthquake over, the United Nations said Saturday, with little hope of finding more people alive 10 days after much of the capital was reduced to rubble.
The statement from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs comes the day after an Israeli team reported pulling a man out of the debris of a two-story home and relatives said an elderly woman had been rescued.
Spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said she was unable to comment on the rescue reports. But she said the government's Friday afternoon decision didn't mean rescue teams still searching for survivors would be stopped from carrying out whatever work they felt necessary.
"It doesn't mean the government will order them to stop. In case there is the slightest sign of life, they will act," she told The Associated Press.
She added, however, that "except for miracles, hope is unfortunately fading."
Some 132 people were pulled alive from beneath collapsed buildings by international search and rescue teams since the Jan. 12 disaster, she said. Humanitarian relief efforts are still being scaled up in the capital Port-au-Prince, Jacmel, Leogane and other areas affected by the quake, Byrs said.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said Saturday no decision had yet been taken to halt their search and rescue operations.
The Israeli delegation was initially intended to be in Haiti for two weeks. However the spokeswoman, who could not be named citing military regulations, said it was continuously assessing the situation to see whether they should continue or not.
The 7.0-magnitude quake killed an estimated 200,000 people, according to Haitian government figures cited by the European Commission. Countless dead remained buried in thousands of collapsed and toppled buildings in Port-au-Prince, while as many as 200,000 have fled the city of 2 million, the U.S. Agency for International Development reported.
About 609,000 people are homeless in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, and the United Nations estimates that up to 1 million people could leave Haiti's destroyed cities for rural areas already struggling with extreme poverty.
On Saturday, some are expected to gather for the funeral of the archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Msgr. Joseph Serge Miot, near the ruins of his cathedral.
Far away, celebrities and artists made impassioned pleas Fridaycelebrities for charitable donations during an internationally broadcast telethon.
"The Haitian people need our help," said George Clooney, who helped organize the two-hour telecast. "They need to know that they are not alone. They need to know that we still care."
Scores of aid organizations, big and small, have stepped up deliveries of food, water, medical supplies and other aid to the homeless and other needy in seaside city. But obstacles remained at every turn to getting help into people's hands.
"I want to leave but I don't have any money. I don't know where to go," said Demonere Mirlande, a 33-year-old mother who lost her home but survived along with her three young children.
'I felt the house dancing around me'
On Friday, the Israeli team that rescued 21-year-old Emmannuel Buso said relatives approached asking for help. They pulled away the debris of a two-story home and called out. To everyone's surprise, Buso responded.
The slender student and tailor with deep-set eyes emerged so ghostly white that his mother told rescuers she thought he was a corpse. In an interview with The Associated Press, he described coming out of the shower when the quake hit.
"I felt the house dancing around me," Buso said from a bed in an Israeli field hospital. "I didn't know if I was up or down."
He told of passing out in the rubble, dreaming at times that he could hear his mother crying. The furniture in his room had collapsed around him in such a way that it created a small space for him amid the ruins of the house. He had no food. When he got desperately thirsty, he drank his urine.
"I am here today because God wants it," Buso said.
Also Friday, an 84-year-old woman was said by relatives to have been pulled from the wreckage of her home, according to doctors administering oxygen and intravenous fluids to her at the General Hospital. She was in critical condition.
Rescuers said they were encouraged but all too aware that few trapped people can survive for that long.
"Statistically you can say that the chances of survival is very low," said Fernando Alvarez Bravo, a representative in Mexico for rescue crews founded during the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, and still at work in Haiti on Friday.
"But the hope it gives the population to recover and find their loved ones helps them to recover quickly. They don't feel abandoned."
The rescues came two days after many international search teams began packing up their gear and other aid groups remained to grapple with challenges of helping survivors.
In the three miles or so between Port-au-Prince and hard-hit Carrefour, satellite images show 691 blockages on the road — collapsed houses or other debris — the U.N. reported.
President Rene Preval's administration as working with the United Nations Development Program and other aid groups to restore electricity and telecommunications, reopen banks, businesses and money-transfer houses, and to provide at least low-paying jobs to Haitians desperate for income.
© 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Haiti ends search for quake survivors
Decision comes hours after two people were rescued from the rubble
Emmannuel Buso, 21, rests at a hospital in Port-au-Prince on Friday after being rescued from the rubble of a building where he was trapped for 10 days.
The Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Haiti's government has declared the search and rescue phase for survivors of the earthquake over, the United Nations said Saturday, with little hope of finding more people alive 10 days after much of the capital was reduced to rubble.
The statement from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs comes the day after an Israeli team reported pulling a man out of the debris of a two-story home and relatives said an elderly woman had been rescued.
Spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said she was unable to comment on the rescue reports. But she said the government's Friday afternoon decision didn't mean rescue teams still searching for survivors would be stopped from carrying out whatever work they felt necessary.
"It doesn't mean the government will order them to stop. In case there is the slightest sign of life, they will act," she told The Associated Press.
She added, however, that "except for miracles, hope is unfortunately fading."
Some 132 people were pulled alive from beneath collapsed buildings by international search and rescue teams since the Jan. 12 disaster, she said. Humanitarian relief efforts are still being scaled up in the capital Port-au-Prince, Jacmel, Leogane and other areas affected by the quake, Byrs said.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said Saturday no decision had yet been taken to halt their search and rescue operations.
The Israeli delegation was initially intended to be in Haiti for two weeks. However the spokeswoman, who could not be named citing military regulations, said it was continuously assessing the situation to see whether they should continue or not.
The 7.0-magnitude quake killed an estimated 200,000 people, according to Haitian government figures cited by the European Commission. Countless dead remained buried in thousands of collapsed and toppled buildings in Port-au-Prince, while as many as 200,000 have fled the city of 2 million, the U.S. Agency for International Development reported.
About 609,000 people are homeless in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, and the United Nations estimates that up to 1 million people could leave Haiti's destroyed cities for rural areas already struggling with extreme poverty.
On Saturday, some are expected to gather for the funeral of the archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Msgr. Joseph Serge Miot, near the ruins of his cathedral.
Far away, celebrities and artists made impassioned pleas Fridaycelebrities for charitable donations during an internationally broadcast telethon.
"The Haitian people need our help," said George Clooney, who helped organize the two-hour telecast. "They need to know that they are not alone. They need to know that we still care."
Scores of aid organizations, big and small, have stepped up deliveries of food, water, medical supplies and other aid to the homeless and other needy in seaside city. But obstacles remained at every turn to getting help into people's hands.
"I want to leave but I don't have any money. I don't know where to go," said Demonere Mirlande, a 33-year-old mother who lost her home but survived along with her three young children.
'I felt the house dancing around me'
On Friday, the Israeli team that rescued 21-year-old Emmannuel Buso said relatives approached asking for help. They pulled away the debris of a two-story home and called out. To everyone's surprise, Buso responded.
The slender student and tailor with deep-set eyes emerged so ghostly white that his mother told rescuers she thought he was a corpse. In an interview with The Associated Press, he described coming out of the shower when the quake hit.
"I felt the house dancing around me," Buso said from a bed in an Israeli field hospital. "I didn't know if I was up or down."
He told of passing out in the rubble, dreaming at times that he could hear his mother crying. The furniture in his room had collapsed around him in such a way that it created a small space for him amid the ruins of the house. He had no food. When he got desperately thirsty, he drank his urine.
"I am here today because God wants it," Buso said.
Also Friday, an 84-year-old woman was said by relatives to have been pulled from the wreckage of her home, according to doctors administering oxygen and intravenous fluids to her at the General Hospital. She was in critical condition.
Rescuers said they were encouraged but all too aware that few trapped people can survive for that long.
"Statistically you can say that the chances of survival is very low," said Fernando Alvarez Bravo, a representative in Mexico for rescue crews founded during the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, and still at work in Haiti on Friday.
"But the hope it gives the population to recover and find their loved ones helps them to recover quickly. They don't feel abandoned."
The rescues came two days after many international search teams began packing up their gear and other aid groups remained to grapple with challenges of helping survivors.
In the three miles or so between Port-au-Prince and hard-hit Carrefour, satellite images show 691 blockages on the road — collapsed houses or other debris — the U.N. reported.
President Rene Preval's administration as working with the United Nations Development Program and other aid groups to restore electricity and telecommunications, reopen banks, businesses and money-transfer houses, and to provide at least low-paying jobs to Haitians desperate for income.
© 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
Haitians returning to native towns
by doug » Sun Jan 24, 2010 10:29 am
updated 9:50 a.m. ET Jan. 24, 2010
Haitians returning to native towns
Government hopes disaster will set course for reverse migration to country
Marguerite Dorival, 45, right, moved from Port-au-Prince along with her family after the earthquake to Cabaret.
The Associated Press
CABARET, Haiti - Barefoot and limping from a fall suffered during last week's earthquake, Marguerite Dorival walked 20 miles from the capital to her ancestral home, leaving behind apocalyptic scenes of bodies trapped in rubble for the tranquility of her plantain-growing farm.
She doubts she will ever return, she said, sitting under a mango tree buzzing with humming birds, a dog lounging beside her.
"What is most important to me is that God gave me a chance to make it back alive. We struggled to get here, but now I'm with my family. I'm glad we are well," said Dorival, a 45-year-old farmer.
With the capital of Port-au-Prince largely flattened by the 7.0-magnitude quake that killed an estimated 200,000 people and left many more homeless, the government is encouraging Haitians to undertake a sort of reverse migration back to the countryside, where grinding poverty led them to seek out a better life in urban slums in the first place.
Authorities are offering free transportation to those who wish to leave, and so far more than 130,000 people have taken them up on the offer. Ultimately, the United Nations expects as many as many as 1 million Haitians — or one-ninth of the country's population — will flee Port-au-Prince and other damaged cities for the country.
Wrecked and weary
An untold number, like Dorival, have already left under their own power. She never did find work in Port-au-Prince after moving there a year ago so that a niece could go to nursing school.
Along with her 14-year-old son and a cousin, they lived in a single room on the second story of an apartment building that partially collapsed on Jan. 12. When the building began to crumble, Dorival clung to the metal bars of a window. But they buckled, the floor was rocking underfoot and a water tank knocked her down 28 steps of the staircase.
Dorival's 29-year-old cousin, Eliasen Saint, was buried in the rubble and is believed dead. The rest of the family escaped and spent the first night with tens of thousands other newly homeless on the downtown Champs de Mars plaza, opposite the ruins of the National Palace.
The following morning they set out on foot walking National Route 1, passing rows of downed warehouses and homes. The destruction diminished as they reached mountains with the sides hollowed out, chalky white caverns where workers excavated material to make the concrete homes that collapsed.
They trudged on with nothing to eat or drink under the burning Caribbean sun, the road choked with other refugees. Dorival particularly struggled, having hurt her hip and leg in the fall.
As the sun began to set, they turned down a dirt path lined with plantain trees that leads to the family home: a small yellow concrete building topped by a corrugated tin roof. The outhouse was no more, but the house was intact.
No rest
Nobody dares sleep indoors for fear of aftershocks, however. The family of 11 spends nights outside under a tent erected around back.
Cabaret itself sustained little damage; some homes cracked, none collapsed. Standing intact is the circular pit where the town holds the cock fights that made it famous.
Dorival, in a white lace blouse, khaki pants and mismatched socks, said she will likely spend the rest of her life in this city of 80,000.
"This is a little town. I feel more comfortable here," she said.
According to the U.N., the largest post-quake population shift has been to the Artibonite district, a rice-growing area north of the capital that is now home to at least 50,000 reverse migrants.
But the hundreds of thousands fleeing the cities are returning to a region under tremendous economic pressure: 80 percent of country residents live on less than $1 a day, according to U.N. statistics.
And Dorival noted that with Haiti's government so centralized, life will inevitably bring her back to the scene of her nightmare at least occasionally.
"Everything is concentrated in Port-au-Prince. If you need an ID card, it's in the capital. Anything you need is in the capital," she said. "But I don't know if it's ever going to be safe again."
© 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Haitians returning to native towns
Government hopes disaster will set course for reverse migration to country
Marguerite Dorival, 45, right, moved from Port-au-Prince along with her family after the earthquake to Cabaret.
The Associated Press
CABARET, Haiti - Barefoot and limping from a fall suffered during last week's earthquake, Marguerite Dorival walked 20 miles from the capital to her ancestral home, leaving behind apocalyptic scenes of bodies trapped in rubble for the tranquility of her plantain-growing farm.
She doubts she will ever return, she said, sitting under a mango tree buzzing with humming birds, a dog lounging beside her.
"What is most important to me is that God gave me a chance to make it back alive. We struggled to get here, but now I'm with my family. I'm glad we are well," said Dorival, a 45-year-old farmer.
With the capital of Port-au-Prince largely flattened by the 7.0-magnitude quake that killed an estimated 200,000 people and left many more homeless, the government is encouraging Haitians to undertake a sort of reverse migration back to the countryside, where grinding poverty led them to seek out a better life in urban slums in the first place.
Authorities are offering free transportation to those who wish to leave, and so far more than 130,000 people have taken them up on the offer. Ultimately, the United Nations expects as many as many as 1 million Haitians — or one-ninth of the country's population — will flee Port-au-Prince and other damaged cities for the country.
Wrecked and weary
An untold number, like Dorival, have already left under their own power. She never did find work in Port-au-Prince after moving there a year ago so that a niece could go to nursing school.
Along with her 14-year-old son and a cousin, they lived in a single room on the second story of an apartment building that partially collapsed on Jan. 12. When the building began to crumble, Dorival clung to the metal bars of a window. But they buckled, the floor was rocking underfoot and a water tank knocked her down 28 steps of the staircase.
Dorival's 29-year-old cousin, Eliasen Saint, was buried in the rubble and is believed dead. The rest of the family escaped and spent the first night with tens of thousands other newly homeless on the downtown Champs de Mars plaza, opposite the ruins of the National Palace.
The following morning they set out on foot walking National Route 1, passing rows of downed warehouses and homes. The destruction diminished as they reached mountains with the sides hollowed out, chalky white caverns where workers excavated material to make the concrete homes that collapsed.
They trudged on with nothing to eat or drink under the burning Caribbean sun, the road choked with other refugees. Dorival particularly struggled, having hurt her hip and leg in the fall.
As the sun began to set, they turned down a dirt path lined with plantain trees that leads to the family home: a small yellow concrete building topped by a corrugated tin roof. The outhouse was no more, but the house was intact.
No rest
Nobody dares sleep indoors for fear of aftershocks, however. The family of 11 spends nights outside under a tent erected around back.
Cabaret itself sustained little damage; some homes cracked, none collapsed. Standing intact is the circular pit where the town holds the cock fights that made it famous.
Dorival, in a white lace blouse, khaki pants and mismatched socks, said she will likely spend the rest of her life in this city of 80,000.
"This is a little town. I feel more comfortable here," she said.
According to the U.N., the largest post-quake population shift has been to the Artibonite district, a rice-growing area north of the capital that is now home to at least 50,000 reverse migrants.
But the hundreds of thousands fleeing the cities are returning to a region under tremendous economic pressure: 80 percent of country residents live on less than $1 a day, according to U.N. statistics.
And Dorival noted that with Haiti's government so centralized, life will inevitably bring her back to the scene of her nightmare at least occasionally.
"Everything is concentrated in Port-au-Prince. If you need an ID card, it's in the capital. Anything you need is in the capital," she said. "But I don't know if it's ever going to be safe again."
© 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
Haiti: 150,000 quake victims in graves
by doug » Mon Jan 25, 2010 12:42 am
updated 4:41 p.m. ET Jan. 24, 2010
Haiti: 150,000 quake victims in graves
Tens of thousands more still under rubble or killed in areas outside capital
Debris removal was a focus of the recovery work Sunday in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
The Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - More than 150,000 quake victims have been buried by the government, an official said Sunday. But that doesn't even count those still under the debris, carried off by relatives or killed in the outlying quake zone.
"Nobody knows how many bodies are buried in the rubble — 200,000? 300,000? Who knows the overall death toll?" said the official, Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue.
Dealing with the living, meanwhile, a global army of aid workers was getting more food into people's hands, but acknowledged falling short. "We wish we could do more, quicker," said U.N. World Food Program chief Josette Sheeran, visiting Port-au-Prince.
In the Cite Soleil slum, U.S. soldiers and Brazilian U.N. peacekeeping troops distributed food. Lunie Marcelin, 57, said the handouts will help her and six grown children "but it is not enough. We need more."
Yet another aftershock, one of more than 50 since the great quake Jan. 12, shook Port-au-Prince on Sunday, registering 4.7 magnitude, the U.S. Geological Survey said. There were no immediate reports of further damage.
The Haitian government was urging many of the estimated 600,000 homeless huddled in open areas of Port-au-Prince, a city of 2 million, to look for better shelter with relatives or others in the countryside. Some 200,000 were believed already to have done so, most taking advantage of free government transportation, and others formed a steady stream out of the city on Sunday.
International experts searched for sites to erect tent cities for quake refugees on the capital's outskirts, but such short-term solutions were still weeks away, said the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental agency.
"We also need tents. There is a shortage of tents," said Vincent Houver, the Geneva-based agency's chief of mission in Haiti. Their Port-au-Prince warehouse has 10,000 family-size tents, but some 100,000 are needed, he said. The organization has appealed for $30 million for that and other needs, and has received two-thirds of that so far.
In the aftermath of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake, the casualty estimates have been necessarily tentative. Lassegue told The Associated Press the government's figure of 150,000 buried, from the capital area alone, was reported by CNE, a state company collecting corpses and burying them north of Port-au-Prince.
That number would tend to confirm an overall estimate of 200,000 dead reported last week by the European Commission, citing Haitian government sources. The United Nations, meanwhile, was sticking Sunday with an earlier confirmed death toll of at least 111,481, based on recovered bodies.
The final casualty estimates, which the European Commission said also include some 250,000 injured, will clearly place the Jan. 12 earthquake among the deadliest natural catastrophes of recent times. That list includes: the 1970 Bangladesh cyclone, believed to have killed 300,000 people; the 1974 northeast China earthquake, which killed at least 242,000 people; and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, with 226,000 dead.
Latest survivor wants to go to church
One who wouldn't die in Port-au-Prince was Wismond Exantus, who was extricated from the rubble Saturday. He spoke with the AP from his cot in a French field hospital on Sunday, saying the first thing he wanted to do was find a church to give thanks.
He spent the 11 days buried in the ruins of a hotel grocery store praying, reciting psalms and sleeping, he said. "I wasn't afraid because I knew they were searching and would come for me," he said.
With further such rescues highly unlikely so long after the quake, Haiti's government has declared an end to search operations for the living, shifting the focus more than ever to caring for the thousands surviving in squalid, makeshift camps.
The World Food Program had delivered about 2 million meals to the needy on Friday, up from 1.2 million on Thursday, Sheeran said. But she acknowledged that much more was needed.
"This is the most complex operation WFP has ever launched," she said.
The scene Sunday at Cite Soleil, the capital's largest and most notorious slum, showed the need.
Thousands of men, women and children lined up and waited peacefully for their turn as the American and Brazilian troops handed out aid — the Americans gave ready-to-eat meals, high-energy biscuits and bottled water, the Brazilians passed out small bags holding uncooked beans, salt, sugar and sardines, as well as water.
The need for medical care, especially surgery, postoperative care and drugs, still overwhelmed the help available, aid agencies reported. In the isolated southern port city of Jacmel alone, about 100 patients needed surgery as of Friday, the U.N. reported. Medical personnel were there, but not the necessary surgery supplies.
In Port-au-Prince, meanwhile, the aid group Doctors Without Borders said its inflatable hospital — six large inflatable tents flown in from France — was preparing for its first operations.
The world's nations have pledged some $1 billion in emergency aid to Haiti. Organizers of Friday night's "Hope for Haiti Now" international telethon reported the event raised $57 million, with more pledges from ordinary people still coming in.
© 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Haiti: 150,000 quake victims in graves
Tens of thousands more still under rubble or killed in areas outside capital
Debris removal was a focus of the recovery work Sunday in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
The Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - More than 150,000 quake victims have been buried by the government, an official said Sunday. But that doesn't even count those still under the debris, carried off by relatives or killed in the outlying quake zone.
"Nobody knows how many bodies are buried in the rubble — 200,000? 300,000? Who knows the overall death toll?" said the official, Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue.
Dealing with the living, meanwhile, a global army of aid workers was getting more food into people's hands, but acknowledged falling short. "We wish we could do more, quicker," said U.N. World Food Program chief Josette Sheeran, visiting Port-au-Prince.
In the Cite Soleil slum, U.S. soldiers and Brazilian U.N. peacekeeping troops distributed food. Lunie Marcelin, 57, said the handouts will help her and six grown children "but it is not enough. We need more."
Yet another aftershock, one of more than 50 since the great quake Jan. 12, shook Port-au-Prince on Sunday, registering 4.7 magnitude, the U.S. Geological Survey said. There were no immediate reports of further damage.
The Haitian government was urging many of the estimated 600,000 homeless huddled in open areas of Port-au-Prince, a city of 2 million, to look for better shelter with relatives or others in the countryside. Some 200,000 were believed already to have done so, most taking advantage of free government transportation, and others formed a steady stream out of the city on Sunday.
International experts searched for sites to erect tent cities for quake refugees on the capital's outskirts, but such short-term solutions were still weeks away, said the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental agency.
"We also need tents. There is a shortage of tents," said Vincent Houver, the Geneva-based agency's chief of mission in Haiti. Their Port-au-Prince warehouse has 10,000 family-size tents, but some 100,000 are needed, he said. The organization has appealed for $30 million for that and other needs, and has received two-thirds of that so far.
In the aftermath of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake, the casualty estimates have been necessarily tentative. Lassegue told The Associated Press the government's figure of 150,000 buried, from the capital area alone, was reported by CNE, a state company collecting corpses and burying them north of Port-au-Prince.
That number would tend to confirm an overall estimate of 200,000 dead reported last week by the European Commission, citing Haitian government sources. The United Nations, meanwhile, was sticking Sunday with an earlier confirmed death toll of at least 111,481, based on recovered bodies.
The final casualty estimates, which the European Commission said also include some 250,000 injured, will clearly place the Jan. 12 earthquake among the deadliest natural catastrophes of recent times. That list includes: the 1970 Bangladesh cyclone, believed to have killed 300,000 people; the 1974 northeast China earthquake, which killed at least 242,000 people; and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, with 226,000 dead.
Latest survivor wants to go to church
One who wouldn't die in Port-au-Prince was Wismond Exantus, who was extricated from the rubble Saturday. He spoke with the AP from his cot in a French field hospital on Sunday, saying the first thing he wanted to do was find a church to give thanks.
He spent the 11 days buried in the ruins of a hotel grocery store praying, reciting psalms and sleeping, he said. "I wasn't afraid because I knew they were searching and would come for me," he said.
With further such rescues highly unlikely so long after the quake, Haiti's government has declared an end to search operations for the living, shifting the focus more than ever to caring for the thousands surviving in squalid, makeshift camps.
The World Food Program had delivered about 2 million meals to the needy on Friday, up from 1.2 million on Thursday, Sheeran said. But she acknowledged that much more was needed.
"This is the most complex operation WFP has ever launched," she said.
The scene Sunday at Cite Soleil, the capital's largest and most notorious slum, showed the need.
Thousands of men, women and children lined up and waited peacefully for their turn as the American and Brazilian troops handed out aid — the Americans gave ready-to-eat meals, high-energy biscuits and bottled water, the Brazilians passed out small bags holding uncooked beans, salt, sugar and sardines, as well as water.
The need for medical care, especially surgery, postoperative care and drugs, still overwhelmed the help available, aid agencies reported. In the isolated southern port city of Jacmel alone, about 100 patients needed surgery as of Friday, the U.N. reported. Medical personnel were there, but not the necessary surgery supplies.
In Port-au-Prince, meanwhile, the aid group Doctors Without Borders said its inflatable hospital — six large inflatable tents flown in from France — was preparing for its first operations.
The world's nations have pledged some $1 billion in emergency aid to Haiti. Organizers of Friday night's "Hope for Haiti Now" international telethon reported the event raised $57 million, with more pledges from ordinary people still coming in.
© 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
U.N.: 1 million Haitians need shelter
by doug » Mon Jan 25, 2010 3:45 pm
updated 12:18 p.m. ET Jan. 25, 2010
U.N.: 1 million Haitians need shelter
World leaders meet in Montreal to ponder ways to boost relief efforts
Haitians line up for aid at a makeshift camp in Port-au-Prince on Monday.
The Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Haiti's prime minister said Monday his country needs to rely strongly on its partners but its government is able to lead the rebuilding effort after this month's devastating earthquake.
Jean-Max Bellerive addressed foreign ministers from a host of nations meeting in Montreal on ways to improve relief efforts in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 quake. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was among the leaders attending.
Bellerive said Haiti will need "more and more and more in order to complete the task of reconstruction."
He said six groups have been set up to deal with issues such as humanitarian aid, housing and security. Each group is being led by a Haitian minister as well as an international party.
The collapse of much of Haiti's capital has a large part of the nation struggling just to find a place to sleep.
As many as 1 million people — one person in nine across the entire country — need to find new shelter, the United Nations estimates, and there are too few tents, let alone safe buildings, to put them in.
That leaves about 700,000 other people living on the streets around Port-au-Prince under whatever they can salvage. In the case of Jean Anthony's family, that's a blue plastic tarpaulin for a ceiling and a faded pink sheet with a floral print border for two walls.
"I'm not sure what you'd call it, but it's much more than terrible," said Anthony, the 60-year-old owner of a collapsed restaurant. Thousands of people were camped around him Monday across from the National Palace, amid piles of trash and the stench of human waste.
"We live like dogs," said Espiegle Amilcar, an unemployed 34-year-old who has been living under a sheet of plastic nearby.
Establishing tent cities
Aid organizations say they are collecting tents, but few so far are in evidence. And the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental agency, says it could take experts weeks to search out suitable sites for enough tent cities to hold earthquake refugees.
Vincent Houver, the Geneva-based agency's chief of mission in Haiti, said Sunday that the agency's warehouse in Port-au-Prince holds 10,000 family-size tents, but he estimates 100,000 are needed.
The organization has appealed for $30 million to pay for tents and other aid needs and has received two-thirds of that so far, he said.
Haiti's government wants many of the homeless to leave the capital city of 2 million people to look for better shelter with relatives or others elsewhere. Officials estimate that about 235,000 have taken advantage of its offer of free transport to leave the city, and many others left on their own, some even walking.
An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 have returned to the region around the coastal city of Gonaives in northern Haiti, a city abandoned by many after two devastating floods in six years.
"Living in Port-au-Prince is a problem. Going to Gonaives is another problem," said Maire Delphin Alceus. "Everywhere you go is a problem. If I could, I would have left this country and been somewhere else by now. But I have no way to do that."
Her daughter, Katya, was among the thousands killed in Gonaives and the surrounding Artibonite area by the floods of 2004's Tropical Storm Jeanne. The family moved to Port-au-Prince, where the earthquake killed her 26-year-old son and her half-sister, who provided for them by importing clothes and perfume from Miami for resale in Haiti.
What's left of the family is back in Gonaives, which is overlooked by mountains denuded by over-farming and rampant tree cutting for firewood that have cleared a path for destructive floods.
"I'm scared, but I'm living by the will of God," said Alceus, dressed in white after attending Sunday services at an evangelical church.
Death toll not known
At least 55 sizable aftershocks have followed the magnitude-7 quake of Jan. 12, adding to the fear of survivors.
More than 150,000 quake victims have been buried by the government, an official said Sunday, but she said that doesn't count the bodies still in wrecked buildings, buried or burned by relatives or dead in outlying quake areas.
"Nobody knows how many bodies are buried in the rubble," said Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said. Asked about the total number of victims, she said, "200,000? 300,000? Who knows the overall death toll?"
Lassegue told The Associated Press that the government's figure of 150,000 buried from just the capital area was based on figures from CNE, a state company that is collecting corpses and burying them north of Port-au-Prince.
Attending to the living
An estimate of 200,000 dead was reported last week by the European Commission, citing Haitian government sources. As of Monday, the United Nations was reporting at least 112,250 confirmed deaths, based on recovered bodies.
The final toll will clearly place the Haiti earthquake among the deadliest natural catastrophes of recent times. That list includes the 1970 Bangladesh cyclone, believed to have killed 300,000 people; the 1974 northeast China earthquake, which killed at least 242,000 people, and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, with 226,000 dead.
Attending to the living, meanwhile, an army of international aid workers was getting more food into people's hands, but still falling short.
Food aid has reached 500,000 people at least once, the U.N. reported Sunday, but as many as 2 million people are in need.
"We wish we could do more, quicker," said Josette Sheeran, the U.N. World Food Program chief who was visiting Port-au-Prince.
Much of the aid flows though the capital's strained airport, not far from a makeshift camp in a public park where Leger Lunes has been living with his wife and year-old daughter under a triangular shelter of blankets propped on sticks.
Lunes, 39, said none of the aid has reached his family, which has survived by selling cookies along the roadside, getting enough money to buy a little rice.
He said he's willing to move into a more organized tent camp if the government asks.
"It's not a problem. The only thing I need is a job."
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
U.N.: 1 million Haitians need shelter
World leaders meet in Montreal to ponder ways to boost relief efforts
Haitians line up for aid at a makeshift camp in Port-au-Prince on Monday.
The Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Haiti's prime minister said Monday his country needs to rely strongly on its partners but its government is able to lead the rebuilding effort after this month's devastating earthquake.
Jean-Max Bellerive addressed foreign ministers from a host of nations meeting in Montreal on ways to improve relief efforts in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 quake. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was among the leaders attending.
Bellerive said Haiti will need "more and more and more in order to complete the task of reconstruction."
He said six groups have been set up to deal with issues such as humanitarian aid, housing and security. Each group is being led by a Haitian minister as well as an international party.
The collapse of much of Haiti's capital has a large part of the nation struggling just to find a place to sleep.
As many as 1 million people — one person in nine across the entire country — need to find new shelter, the United Nations estimates, and there are too few tents, let alone safe buildings, to put them in.
That leaves about 700,000 other people living on the streets around Port-au-Prince under whatever they can salvage. In the case of Jean Anthony's family, that's a blue plastic tarpaulin for a ceiling and a faded pink sheet with a floral print border for two walls.
"I'm not sure what you'd call it, but it's much more than terrible," said Anthony, the 60-year-old owner of a collapsed restaurant. Thousands of people were camped around him Monday across from the National Palace, amid piles of trash and the stench of human waste.
"We live like dogs," said Espiegle Amilcar, an unemployed 34-year-old who has been living under a sheet of plastic nearby.
Establishing tent cities
Aid organizations say they are collecting tents, but few so far are in evidence. And the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental agency, says it could take experts weeks to search out suitable sites for enough tent cities to hold earthquake refugees.
Vincent Houver, the Geneva-based agency's chief of mission in Haiti, said Sunday that the agency's warehouse in Port-au-Prince holds 10,000 family-size tents, but he estimates 100,000 are needed.
The organization has appealed for $30 million to pay for tents and other aid needs and has received two-thirds of that so far, he said.
Haiti's government wants many of the homeless to leave the capital city of 2 million people to look for better shelter with relatives or others elsewhere. Officials estimate that about 235,000 have taken advantage of its offer of free transport to leave the city, and many others left on their own, some even walking.
An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 have returned to the region around the coastal city of Gonaives in northern Haiti, a city abandoned by many after two devastating floods in six years.
"Living in Port-au-Prince is a problem. Going to Gonaives is another problem," said Maire Delphin Alceus. "Everywhere you go is a problem. If I could, I would have left this country and been somewhere else by now. But I have no way to do that."
Her daughter, Katya, was among the thousands killed in Gonaives and the surrounding Artibonite area by the floods of 2004's Tropical Storm Jeanne. The family moved to Port-au-Prince, where the earthquake killed her 26-year-old son and her half-sister, who provided for them by importing clothes and perfume from Miami for resale in Haiti.
What's left of the family is back in Gonaives, which is overlooked by mountains denuded by over-farming and rampant tree cutting for firewood that have cleared a path for destructive floods.
"I'm scared, but I'm living by the will of God," said Alceus, dressed in white after attending Sunday services at an evangelical church.
Death toll not known
At least 55 sizable aftershocks have followed the magnitude-7 quake of Jan. 12, adding to the fear of survivors.
More than 150,000 quake victims have been buried by the government, an official said Sunday, but she said that doesn't count the bodies still in wrecked buildings, buried or burned by relatives or dead in outlying quake areas.
"Nobody knows how many bodies are buried in the rubble," said Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said. Asked about the total number of victims, she said, "200,000? 300,000? Who knows the overall death toll?"
Lassegue told The Associated Press that the government's figure of 150,000 buried from just the capital area was based on figures from CNE, a state company that is collecting corpses and burying them north of Port-au-Prince.
Attending to the living
An estimate of 200,000 dead was reported last week by the European Commission, citing Haitian government sources. As of Monday, the United Nations was reporting at least 112,250 confirmed deaths, based on recovered bodies.
The final toll will clearly place the Haiti earthquake among the deadliest natural catastrophes of recent times. That list includes the 1970 Bangladesh cyclone, believed to have killed 300,000 people; the 1974 northeast China earthquake, which killed at least 242,000 people, and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, with 226,000 dead.
Attending to the living, meanwhile, an army of international aid workers was getting more food into people's hands, but still falling short.
Food aid has reached 500,000 people at least once, the U.N. reported Sunday, but as many as 2 million people are in need.
"We wish we could do more, quicker," said Josette Sheeran, the U.N. World Food Program chief who was visiting Port-au-Prince.
Much of the aid flows though the capital's strained airport, not far from a makeshift camp in a public park where Leger Lunes has been living with his wife and year-old daughter under a triangular shelter of blankets propped on sticks.
Lunes, 39, said none of the aid has reached his family, which has survived by selling cookies along the roadside, getting enough money to buy a little rice.
He said he's willing to move into a more organized tent camp if the government asks.
"It's not a problem. The only thing I need is a job."
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
Church, activists plan to airlift Haitian orphans
by doug » Tue Jan 26, 2010 12:19 pm
Church, activists plan to airlift Haitian orphans
The Miami Herald is reporting that Catholic Charities and other South Florida immigrant rights organizations are working on a program to relocate thousands of orphaned Haitian children to the United States in response to the earthquake that ravaged Haiti early in January.
The program will attempt to emulate Operation Pedro Pan. During that 1960s program, Cuban children were airlifted and placed with family members or orphanages in the United States in response to the Castro regime. The Cuban children who were part of Operation Pedro Pan, however, were reunited with their parents once the parents found a way out of Cuba.
Catholic Charities officials say they temporary shelter available for the orphaned Haitian children. Therefore, they are urging the Obama administration to help the non-profit organizations with providing humanitarian visas for the children.
http://visalaw.c.topica.com/maanKc9abVPqAboVcGUb/
The Miami Herald is reporting that Catholic Charities and other South Florida immigrant rights organizations are working on a program to relocate thousands of orphaned Haitian children to the United States in response to the earthquake that ravaged Haiti early in January.
The program will attempt to emulate Operation Pedro Pan. During that 1960s program, Cuban children were airlifted and placed with family members or orphanages in the United States in response to the Castro regime. The Cuban children who were part of Operation Pedro Pan, however, were reunited with their parents once the parents found a way out of Cuba.
Catholic Charities officials say they temporary shelter available for the orphaned Haitian children. Therefore, they are urging the Obama administration to help the non-profit organizations with providing humanitarian visas for the children.
http://visalaw.c.topica.com/maanKc9abVPqAboVcGUb/
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
Haiti?s homeless plead for tents after quake
by doug » Tue Jan 26, 2010 3:14 pm
updated 2:56 p.m. ET Jan. 26, 2010
Haiti’s homeless plead for tents after quake
President asks for 200,000 tents and says he will sleep in one too
A woman sits at her tent at a makeshift camp in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Tuesday. Islamic Relief Worldwide said it had brought in 10,000 tents and at least 30,000 more would be arriving.
The Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The dusty soccer field lined with spacious tents is an oasis for earthquake survivors among Haiti's homeless sheltering in acres of squalid camps.
Competition for the canvas homes has boiled into arguments and machete fights, a sign of the desperation felt by the hundreds of thousands of people without homes struggling for shelter in this wrecked city. Haiti's president has asked the world for 200,000 tents and says he will sleep in one himself.
Fenela Jacobs, 39, lives in a 13-by-13-foot abode provided by the Britain-based Islamic Relief Worldwide. She says the group offered her two tents for 21 survivors but she ended up putting everyone in one tent after people threatened to burn both down if she didn't give a tent up.
Still, she says living in the 6-foot-high khaki home with a paisley interior is better than the makeshift shelters crafted from bed sheets propped on wooden sticks where her family was living before.
"It's a lot more comfortable," Jacobs said, though she added it gets really hot inside the tent in Cazo, a Port-au-Prince neighborhood hidden in the hills behind the international airport.
Tents are in desperately short supply following the 7.0-magnitude quake on Jan. 12 that killed at least 150,000 people.
The number of confirmed U.S. deaths stands at 60, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Tuesday, and another 37 Americans were killed but their identities have not been officially established. The department is yet to account for about 4,000 U.S. citizens who have been the subject of inquiries by family members or others since the quake.
The global agency supplying tents said it already had 10,000 stored in Haiti and at least 30,000 more would be arriving. But that "is unlikely to address the extensive shelter needs," the International Organization for Migration stressed.
The organization had estimated 100,000 family-sized tents were needed. But the U.N. says up to 1 million people require shelter, and President Rene Preval issued an urgent appeal Monday calling for 200,000 tents and urging that the aircraft carrying them be given urgent landing priority at Port-au-Prince airport.
Shelters needed before rainy season
In solidarity with earthquake victims, Preval plans to move into a tent home on the manicured lawn of his collapsed National Palace in downtown Port-au-Prince, Tourism Minister Patrick Delatour told The Associated Press.
"It is a decision that the president has made himself," Delatour said.
The secretary-general of the Organization of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza, planned to visit Haiti on Tuesday to study relief efforts.
The Haitian government and international groups were preparing a more substantial tent city on Port-au-Prince's outskirts.
Brazilian army engineers with the U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti have cleared and leveled 12 acres north of the city, planned as the first of more than a half-dozen sites that officials hope will shelter the displaced before the onset of spring rains and summer hurricanes.
Col. Delcio Monteiro Sapper said the Interamerican Development Bank wants to clear a total of 247 acres owned by Haiti's government that could house 100,000 quake refugees.
Helen Clark, administrator of the U.N. Development Program, said providing shelter is a pressing priority that requires innovative solutions.
"China, for example, set up 400,000 semi-permanent houses after the Sichuan earthquake," she said in a statement. "Similar initiatives will need to be considered and supported for Haiti."
On the soccer field in the Cazo neighborhood, the tents are marked "Qatar Aid," a gift from the Gulf state, but some Haitian quake survivors have personalized theirs — one flies a Haitian flag, another has a Jamaican flag with a picture of Bob Marley.
"This was miserable," said Islamic Relief Worldwide's Moustafa Osman, from Birmingham, England, pointing to the few remaining homemade shelters at the site. "People were living like this everywhere."
Osman's own supply of 1,000 tents has yet to make its way to Haiti, stuck somewhere en route or possibly even waiting in containers that have arrived at Port-au-Prince airport but have yet to be unpacked.
He persuaded a Qatari search and rescue team that was leaving Haiti to donate their 82 tents. He desperately needs at least 16 more for the soccer field settlement, which houses 500 people. Latrines and showers are also yet to arrive.
Osman doesn't speak the local Creole language, so he went to a mosque and hired two Haitians to translate for him. He said he made clear to them that "we are not here for the Muslims, we are here for all the people."
He then negotiated with the St. Claire Roman Catholic Church for permission to use the field on their land for his camp and cleared it with Haiti's government. Fights broke out Sunday when workers were distributing tents, with families trying to get the shelters and others competing for space.
Osman confiscated a machete and temporarily evacuated his staff from the camp.
He worries there will be violence if he doesn't get the tents needed to house the remaining families. He hired two men among the refugees, clad them in blue vests marked Islamic Relief Worldwide and put them to work as go-betweens linking the people in the camp and his staff.
Relief and recovery effort
In Montreal on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and officials of more than two dozen donor nations and international organizations met to assess the progress of the relief effort.
The Haitian government asked the international community to provide $3 billion for Haiti's reconstruction, the tourism minister said. Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told the conference his impoverished nation lost 60 percent of its gross domestic product in the quake.
U.S. officials say the rescue phase of the operation is over and the focus has shifted to relief and recovery.
"Outside of the food area, the two prime worries are: one, medical services or medical equipment, and, two, shelter," said Lewis Lucke, U.S. special coordinator for relief and reconstruction.
He said officials are seeing so many people unable to return to their homes that they are scrambling to get them plastic sheeting and other shelter. "This is one of our main priorities."
The U.N. reported Tuesday that more police officers were reporting for duty and Port-au-Prince was generally secure but there had been isolated looting. It said commerce was increasing, with banks, supermarkets and gas stations returning to operation.
The U.S. government is donating its old and unused embassy building in downtown Port-au-Prince to Haiti's government, which will use it as a temporary legislature, according to Delatour, the tourism minister.
The building, next door to the partially collapsed Parliament building, will be rented at a nominal $1 a year, Delatour said. One senator was killed in the collapse and another was trapped for days, but rescued.
There are 54 Americans confirmed dead in Haiti, and U.S. officials were seeking to confirm 36 other possible deaths, State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid said Monday.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Haiti’s homeless plead for tents after quake
President asks for 200,000 tents and says he will sleep in one too
A woman sits at her tent at a makeshift camp in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Tuesday. Islamic Relief Worldwide said it had brought in 10,000 tents and at least 30,000 more would be arriving.
The Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The dusty soccer field lined with spacious tents is an oasis for earthquake survivors among Haiti's homeless sheltering in acres of squalid camps.
Competition for the canvas homes has boiled into arguments and machete fights, a sign of the desperation felt by the hundreds of thousands of people without homes struggling for shelter in this wrecked city. Haiti's president has asked the world for 200,000 tents and says he will sleep in one himself.
Fenela Jacobs, 39, lives in a 13-by-13-foot abode provided by the Britain-based Islamic Relief Worldwide. She says the group offered her two tents for 21 survivors but she ended up putting everyone in one tent after people threatened to burn both down if she didn't give a tent up.
Still, she says living in the 6-foot-high khaki home with a paisley interior is better than the makeshift shelters crafted from bed sheets propped on wooden sticks where her family was living before.
"It's a lot more comfortable," Jacobs said, though she added it gets really hot inside the tent in Cazo, a Port-au-Prince neighborhood hidden in the hills behind the international airport.
Tents are in desperately short supply following the 7.0-magnitude quake on Jan. 12 that killed at least 150,000 people.
The number of confirmed U.S. deaths stands at 60, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Tuesday, and another 37 Americans were killed but their identities have not been officially established. The department is yet to account for about 4,000 U.S. citizens who have been the subject of inquiries by family members or others since the quake.
The global agency supplying tents said it already had 10,000 stored in Haiti and at least 30,000 more would be arriving. But that "is unlikely to address the extensive shelter needs," the International Organization for Migration stressed.
The organization had estimated 100,000 family-sized tents were needed. But the U.N. says up to 1 million people require shelter, and President Rene Preval issued an urgent appeal Monday calling for 200,000 tents and urging that the aircraft carrying them be given urgent landing priority at Port-au-Prince airport.
Shelters needed before rainy season
In solidarity with earthquake victims, Preval plans to move into a tent home on the manicured lawn of his collapsed National Palace in downtown Port-au-Prince, Tourism Minister Patrick Delatour told The Associated Press.
"It is a decision that the president has made himself," Delatour said.
The secretary-general of the Organization of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza, planned to visit Haiti on Tuesday to study relief efforts.
The Haitian government and international groups were preparing a more substantial tent city on Port-au-Prince's outskirts.
Brazilian army engineers with the U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti have cleared and leveled 12 acres north of the city, planned as the first of more than a half-dozen sites that officials hope will shelter the displaced before the onset of spring rains and summer hurricanes.
Col. Delcio Monteiro Sapper said the Interamerican Development Bank wants to clear a total of 247 acres owned by Haiti's government that could house 100,000 quake refugees.
Helen Clark, administrator of the U.N. Development Program, said providing shelter is a pressing priority that requires innovative solutions.
"China, for example, set up 400,000 semi-permanent houses after the Sichuan earthquake," she said in a statement. "Similar initiatives will need to be considered and supported for Haiti."
On the soccer field in the Cazo neighborhood, the tents are marked "Qatar Aid," a gift from the Gulf state, but some Haitian quake survivors have personalized theirs — one flies a Haitian flag, another has a Jamaican flag with a picture of Bob Marley.
"This was miserable," said Islamic Relief Worldwide's Moustafa Osman, from Birmingham, England, pointing to the few remaining homemade shelters at the site. "People were living like this everywhere."
Osman's own supply of 1,000 tents has yet to make its way to Haiti, stuck somewhere en route or possibly even waiting in containers that have arrived at Port-au-Prince airport but have yet to be unpacked.
He persuaded a Qatari search and rescue team that was leaving Haiti to donate their 82 tents. He desperately needs at least 16 more for the soccer field settlement, which houses 500 people. Latrines and showers are also yet to arrive.
Osman doesn't speak the local Creole language, so he went to a mosque and hired two Haitians to translate for him. He said he made clear to them that "we are not here for the Muslims, we are here for all the people."
He then negotiated with the St. Claire Roman Catholic Church for permission to use the field on their land for his camp and cleared it with Haiti's government. Fights broke out Sunday when workers were distributing tents, with families trying to get the shelters and others competing for space.
Osman confiscated a machete and temporarily evacuated his staff from the camp.
He worries there will be violence if he doesn't get the tents needed to house the remaining families. He hired two men among the refugees, clad them in blue vests marked Islamic Relief Worldwide and put them to work as go-betweens linking the people in the camp and his staff.
Relief and recovery effort
In Montreal on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and officials of more than two dozen donor nations and international organizations met to assess the progress of the relief effort.
The Haitian government asked the international community to provide $3 billion for Haiti's reconstruction, the tourism minister said. Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told the conference his impoverished nation lost 60 percent of its gross domestic product in the quake.
U.S. officials say the rescue phase of the operation is over and the focus has shifted to relief and recovery.
"Outside of the food area, the two prime worries are: one, medical services or medical equipment, and, two, shelter," said Lewis Lucke, U.S. special coordinator for relief and reconstruction.
He said officials are seeing so many people unable to return to their homes that they are scrambling to get them plastic sheeting and other shelter. "This is one of our main priorities."
The U.N. reported Tuesday that more police officers were reporting for duty and Port-au-Prince was generally secure but there had been isolated looting. It said commerce was increasing, with banks, supermarkets and gas stations returning to operation.
The U.S. government is donating its old and unused embassy building in downtown Port-au-Prince to Haiti's government, which will use it as a temporary legislature, according to Delatour, the tourism minister.
The building, next door to the partially collapsed Parliament building, will be rented at a nominal $1 a year, Delatour said. One senator was killed in the collapse and another was trapped for days, but rescued.
There are 54 Americans confirmed dead in Haiti, and U.S. officials were seeking to confirm 36 other possible deaths, State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid said Monday.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
Man pulled out alive from Haiti quake rubble
by doug » Tue Jan 26, 2010 6:05 pm
updated 7:10 p.m. ET Jan. 26, 2010
Man pulled out alive from Haiti quake rubble
He's rescued from the ruins of a building in downtown Port-au-Prince
Rico Dibrivell, 35, is attended to by a U.S. military rescue team after being freed from the rubble of a building in Port-au-Prince on Tuesday.
NBC News and news services
PORT-AU-PRINCE - U.S. troops pulled a man alive from the rubble of a building in Haiti's destroyed capital on Tuesday, two weeks after a massive earthquake rattled the country.
It was not immediately clear if he became trapped in the initial Jan. 12 quake or during one of the many aftershocks since then.
The 35-year-old man, Rico Dibrivell, covered in dust and dressed only in underpants, was carried out from the ruins of a building in downtown Port-au-Prince and was driven off for medical treatment, Reuters reported.
A U.S. military spokesperson confirmed to NBC News that the 82nd Airborne rescued a Haitian man. He had injuries to at least one leg — a broken bone, the spokesperson said.
"We don't know if he was there from the beginning or in one of the aftershocks he may have gone under," U.S. Army Spc. Andrew Pourak, who was at the scene, told the AFP news agency.
"He got sent to the hospital. He's going to make it," Pourak said.
The magnitude-7.0 earthquake that struck two weeks ago killed as many as 200,000 people. Most authorities had given up hope this week finding any more survivors and were focusing relief efforts on getting help to hundreds of thousands of survivors left homeless, hungry and injured.
Praying under rubble
The last known rescue prior to Tuesday happened on Saturday, when a man was extricated after spending 11 days under the rubble in Port-au-Prince.
Wismond Exantus, 22, told The Associated Press from his cot in a French field hospital on Sunday that the first thing he wanted to do was find a church to give thanks.
He said he spent the 11 days buried in the ruins of a hotel grocery store praying, reciting psalms and sleeping. "I wasn't afraid because I knew they were searching and would come for me," he said.
Haiti's government has declared an end to basic search operations for the living, shifting the focus to caring for the thousands surviving in squalid, makeshift camps.
© 2010 msnbc.com
Man pulled out alive from Haiti quake rubble
He's rescued from the ruins of a building in downtown Port-au-Prince
Rico Dibrivell, 35, is attended to by a U.S. military rescue team after being freed from the rubble of a building in Port-au-Prince on Tuesday.
NBC News and news services
PORT-AU-PRINCE - U.S. troops pulled a man alive from the rubble of a building in Haiti's destroyed capital on Tuesday, two weeks after a massive earthquake rattled the country.
It was not immediately clear if he became trapped in the initial Jan. 12 quake or during one of the many aftershocks since then.
The 35-year-old man, Rico Dibrivell, covered in dust and dressed only in underpants, was carried out from the ruins of a building in downtown Port-au-Prince and was driven off for medical treatment, Reuters reported.
A U.S. military spokesperson confirmed to NBC News that the 82nd Airborne rescued a Haitian man. He had injuries to at least one leg — a broken bone, the spokesperson said.
"We don't know if he was there from the beginning or in one of the aftershocks he may have gone under," U.S. Army Spc. Andrew Pourak, who was at the scene, told the AFP news agency.
"He got sent to the hospital. He's going to make it," Pourak said.
The magnitude-7.0 earthquake that struck two weeks ago killed as many as 200,000 people. Most authorities had given up hope this week finding any more survivors and were focusing relief efforts on getting help to hundreds of thousands of survivors left homeless, hungry and injured.
Praying under rubble
The last known rescue prior to Tuesday happened on Saturday, when a man was extricated after spending 11 days under the rubble in Port-au-Prince.
Wismond Exantus, 22, told The Associated Press from his cot in a French field hospital on Sunday that the first thing he wanted to do was find a church to give thanks.
He said he spent the 11 days buried in the ruins of a hotel grocery store praying, reciting psalms and sleeping. "I wasn't afraid because I knew they were searching and would come for me," he said.
Haiti's government has declared an end to basic search operations for the living, shifting the focus to caring for the thousands surviving in squalid, makeshift camps.
© 2010 msnbc.com
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
NYT: World of chaos envelops Haiti?s kids
by doug » Wed Jan 27, 2010 8:53 am
updated 3:36 a.m. ET Jan. 27, 2010
NYT: World of chaos envelops Haiti’s kids
‘Unless they get help, they will have lost their childhoods, their innocence’
Daphne Joseph, 14, says she considered suicide after being orphaned by the Haitian earthquake.
By Deborah Sontag
The New York Times
CROIX DES BOUQUETS, Haiti - Not long after 14-year-old Daphne Joseph escaped her collapsed house on the day of the earthquake, she boarded a crowded jitney with her uncle and crawled in traffic toward the capital, where her single mother sold beauty products in the Tête Boeuf marketplace. “Mama,” she said she repeated to herself. “Mama, I’m coming.”
Abandoning the slow-moving jitney, Daphne, petite and delicate, got separated from her uncle and jumped onto a motorcycle-for-hire. She arrived alone at a marketplace in ruins and ran, in her dusty purple sandals, toward a pile of debris laced with “broken people,” she said.
Growing closer, she saw her mother, lifeless. She froze, she said, eventually watching as her mother’s body was dumped in a wheelbarrow and her only parent vanished into the chaos.
“I wanted to kill myself,” Daphne said in a whisper.
Haiti’s children, 45 percent of the population, are among the most disoriented and vulnerable of the survivors of the earthquake. By the many tens of thousands, they have lost their parents, their homes, their schools and their bearings. They have sustained head injuries and undergone amputations. They have slept on the street, foraged for food and suffered nightmares.
Two weeks after the earthquake, with the smell of death still fouling the air, children can be seen in every devastated corner resiliently kicking soccer balls, flying handmade kites, singing pop songs and ferreting out textbooks from the rubble of their schools. But as Haitian and international groups begin tending to the neediest among them, many children are clearly traumatized and at risk.
“There are health concerns, malnutrition concerns, psychosocial issues and, of course, we are concerned that unaccompanied children will be exploited by unscrupulous people who may wish to traffic them for adoption, for the sex trade or for domestic servitude,” said Kent Page, a spokesman for Unicef.
Vertigo
Many children, like Daphne, bore direct witness to horror or survived destruction that killed their relatives, their schoolmates and their teachers. But even those who did not are experiencing vertigo. When the ground shifted beneath them, the landscape of their universe changed forever, and not just at home: 90 percent of schools in the capital, Port-au-Prince, are damaged or destroyed, according to Unicef.
“The children of Haiti, unless they get help, they will have lost their childhoods, their innocence,” Elisabeth Delatour Préval, Haiti’s first lady, said Tuesday, pledging to get schools running as soon as possible, a daunting challenge.
Many children are struggling to make sense of what they are experiencing. Danielle Schledy, 13, who has been living with her family in the courtyard of a destroyed primary school in Port-au-Prince, said she kept telling her parents that the earthquake was “not the end of the world.”
Then, in her soiled turquoise dress and chipped pink nail polish, she skipped over to where her mother, Margarita Dayitus, who had bloody and infected wounds covering her body, lay in misery on the ground.
“I am sad about my mom,” Danielle said.
Poor, middle-class and affluent children are all destabilized, even those who get to spend nights indoors. Marie Alice Craft, a school psychologist, said her 11-year-old daughter had been sleeping with her — in a bed at a relative’s intact house — and waking up with a start when her mother got up to use the bathroom.
“She plays, she smiles, she laughs but she doesn’t want to be alone,” Ms. Craft said, adding that “a lot of group therapy” would be needed to make the children of Haiti feel safe again.
Child-welfare organizations have focused their initial efforts on orphaned children and those who have been separated from their families. They started Tuesday to compile a registry, sending workers into the streets to collect information for a database, in which each child would be assigned a numbered file to help track their cases, said Victor Nyland of Unicef, a senior adviser for child protection and emergencies. Such a registry was used in the Indonesian province of Aceh after the 2004 tsunami to help reunite separated families.
Some children who have nobody willing to look after them will be taken to one of three orphanages in the capital where Unicef is establishing interim care centers — that process began Monday with 60 children — or to safe spaces being established by other organizations.
'We can't replace their parents'
In this city, Daphne was one of 25 newly orphaned children in the care of a local organization called Frades, a collective that does everything from providing microloans to serving hot meals.
“I know we can’t replace their parents,” said Pierre Joseph, a psychologist there. “It’s an intimate loss. But we will do our best to help these kids have a future. We will find a way to create an orphanage for them.”
Early this week, the children, ages 4 to 14, slept huddled together for warmth under bed sheets slung over branches in a tent city on the paved grounds of a damaged school. Young adults took turns looking after them. During the day, the counselors brought them to a walled construction site strewn with rusty cans and broken glass — the only private space they could find — and tried to distract them with singing and clapping games.
Daphne smiled occasionally as she watched the younger children, but mostly she looked stunned. When she told her story, she spoke so softly that she was barely audible. She explained that after she had watched her mother’s body being carted away, she wandered Port-au-Prince in a daze. A distant relative found her and put her in a taxi back to Croix des Bouquets, where she has nothing, she said.
“He told me to be tough,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks.
She and her mother had lived with her uncle, but her uncle was shattered by his sister’s death — “They had to tie him up to calm him down,” Daphne said — and her uncle’s wife did not want her to stay with them. “She has always been mean to me,” Daphne said. “When I would get water, she’d tell me to use a coconut shell and not to dirty one of her glasses.”
Shortly after midday, the volunteers, who had been scraping together their own money to feed the children, gave them their first food of the day: sweet coffee and bread. Later, they fed them rice and beans. Then Mazen Haber, child protection officer with Save the Children, showed up with a large houselike tent and promised to find some mattresses, too.
Watching a dozen grown-ups struggle to erect the tent, Daphne said that adults had told her not to think about her mother. But she could still feel her presence, she said, “like a wind at my back.”
She said she was happy to be with the other children — the sisters with the wilted bows in their hairs, the tiny boys with the terror-stricken eyes — but she said she felt sorry that most had lost both parents.
“Before the earthquake, I only had but Mama,” she said.
This story, "Haiti’s Children Adrift in World of Chaos," originally appeared in The New York Times.
Copyright © 2010 The New York Times
NYT: World of chaos envelops Haiti’s kids
‘Unless they get help, they will have lost their childhoods, their innocence’
Daphne Joseph, 14, says she considered suicide after being orphaned by the Haitian earthquake.
By Deborah Sontag
The New York Times
CROIX DES BOUQUETS, Haiti - Not long after 14-year-old Daphne Joseph escaped her collapsed house on the day of the earthquake, she boarded a crowded jitney with her uncle and crawled in traffic toward the capital, where her single mother sold beauty products in the Tête Boeuf marketplace. “Mama,” she said she repeated to herself. “Mama, I’m coming.”
Abandoning the slow-moving jitney, Daphne, petite and delicate, got separated from her uncle and jumped onto a motorcycle-for-hire. She arrived alone at a marketplace in ruins and ran, in her dusty purple sandals, toward a pile of debris laced with “broken people,” she said.
Growing closer, she saw her mother, lifeless. She froze, she said, eventually watching as her mother’s body was dumped in a wheelbarrow and her only parent vanished into the chaos.
“I wanted to kill myself,” Daphne said in a whisper.
Haiti’s children, 45 percent of the population, are among the most disoriented and vulnerable of the survivors of the earthquake. By the many tens of thousands, they have lost their parents, their homes, their schools and their bearings. They have sustained head injuries and undergone amputations. They have slept on the street, foraged for food and suffered nightmares.
Two weeks after the earthquake, with the smell of death still fouling the air, children can be seen in every devastated corner resiliently kicking soccer balls, flying handmade kites, singing pop songs and ferreting out textbooks from the rubble of their schools. But as Haitian and international groups begin tending to the neediest among them, many children are clearly traumatized and at risk.
“There are health concerns, malnutrition concerns, psychosocial issues and, of course, we are concerned that unaccompanied children will be exploited by unscrupulous people who may wish to traffic them for adoption, for the sex trade or for domestic servitude,” said Kent Page, a spokesman for Unicef.
Vertigo
Many children, like Daphne, bore direct witness to horror or survived destruction that killed their relatives, their schoolmates and their teachers. But even those who did not are experiencing vertigo. When the ground shifted beneath them, the landscape of their universe changed forever, and not just at home: 90 percent of schools in the capital, Port-au-Prince, are damaged or destroyed, according to Unicef.
“The children of Haiti, unless they get help, they will have lost their childhoods, their innocence,” Elisabeth Delatour Préval, Haiti’s first lady, said Tuesday, pledging to get schools running as soon as possible, a daunting challenge.
Many children are struggling to make sense of what they are experiencing. Danielle Schledy, 13, who has been living with her family in the courtyard of a destroyed primary school in Port-au-Prince, said she kept telling her parents that the earthquake was “not the end of the world.”
Then, in her soiled turquoise dress and chipped pink nail polish, she skipped over to where her mother, Margarita Dayitus, who had bloody and infected wounds covering her body, lay in misery on the ground.
“I am sad about my mom,” Danielle said.
Poor, middle-class and affluent children are all destabilized, even those who get to spend nights indoors. Marie Alice Craft, a school psychologist, said her 11-year-old daughter had been sleeping with her — in a bed at a relative’s intact house — and waking up with a start when her mother got up to use the bathroom.
“She plays, she smiles, she laughs but she doesn’t want to be alone,” Ms. Craft said, adding that “a lot of group therapy” would be needed to make the children of Haiti feel safe again.
Child-welfare organizations have focused their initial efforts on orphaned children and those who have been separated from their families. They started Tuesday to compile a registry, sending workers into the streets to collect information for a database, in which each child would be assigned a numbered file to help track their cases, said Victor Nyland of Unicef, a senior adviser for child protection and emergencies. Such a registry was used in the Indonesian province of Aceh after the 2004 tsunami to help reunite separated families.
Some children who have nobody willing to look after them will be taken to one of three orphanages in the capital where Unicef is establishing interim care centers — that process began Monday with 60 children — or to safe spaces being established by other organizations.
'We can't replace their parents'
In this city, Daphne was one of 25 newly orphaned children in the care of a local organization called Frades, a collective that does everything from providing microloans to serving hot meals.
“I know we can’t replace their parents,” said Pierre Joseph, a psychologist there. “It’s an intimate loss. But we will do our best to help these kids have a future. We will find a way to create an orphanage for them.”
Early this week, the children, ages 4 to 14, slept huddled together for warmth under bed sheets slung over branches in a tent city on the paved grounds of a damaged school. Young adults took turns looking after them. During the day, the counselors brought them to a walled construction site strewn with rusty cans and broken glass — the only private space they could find — and tried to distract them with singing and clapping games.
Daphne smiled occasionally as she watched the younger children, but mostly she looked stunned. When she told her story, she spoke so softly that she was barely audible. She explained that after she had watched her mother’s body being carted away, she wandered Port-au-Prince in a daze. A distant relative found her and put her in a taxi back to Croix des Bouquets, where she has nothing, she said.
“He told me to be tough,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks.
She and her mother had lived with her uncle, but her uncle was shattered by his sister’s death — “They had to tie him up to calm him down,” Daphne said — and her uncle’s wife did not want her to stay with them. “She has always been mean to me,” Daphne said. “When I would get water, she’d tell me to use a coconut shell and not to dirty one of her glasses.”
Shortly after midday, the volunteers, who had been scraping together their own money to feed the children, gave them their first food of the day: sweet coffee and bread. Later, they fed them rice and beans. Then Mazen Haber, child protection officer with Save the Children, showed up with a large houselike tent and promised to find some mattresses, too.
Watching a dozen grown-ups struggle to erect the tent, Daphne said that adults had told her not to think about her mother. But she could still feel her presence, she said, “like a wind at my back.”
She said she was happy to be with the other children — the sisters with the wilted bows in their hairs, the tiny boys with the terror-stricken eyes — but she said she felt sorry that most had lost both parents.
“Before the earthquake, I only had but Mama,” she said.
This story, "Haiti’s Children Adrift in World of Chaos," originally appeared in The New York Times.
Copyright © 2010 The New York Times
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
by doug » Wed Jan 27, 2010 9:32 am
NY senator, FL pols call for TPS extension to Haitian illegals
-U.S. officials prepare for potential wave of Haitians
******
NY senator, FL pols call for TPS extension to Haitians
Politico reports that soon after the deadly earthquake experienced in Haiti, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand petitioned President Barack Obama to grant temporary protected status to Haitians living in United States. The junior Senator is urging President Obama to respond quickly by at least preventing Haitian citizens already in the United States from being deported to a ravaged country.
This call to domestic action is supported by previous responses by the United States government in the wake of other natural disasters in the Americas. In 1999, Honduran and Nicaraguan nationals were granted Temporary Protected Status in response to the devastating Hurricane Mitch, while in 2001 El Salvadorian citizens were granted the same status following several deadly earthquakes.
Senator Gillibrand also argues that the halt in Haitian deportation would allow Haitians in the US to earn money to send back home to help rebuild their country.
http://visalaw.c.topica.com/maanKc9abVPqDboVcGUb/
* * * * * *
US officials preparing for potential wave of Haitian immigration
Fox News is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security is preparing in case that there is a mass exodus from Haiti to the United States following this month’s deadly earthquake. Although the U.S Coast Guard has not reported any people fleeing to the United States since the earthquake, the Department of Homeland Security is evaluating options to respond to a large emigration wave from Haiti.
In recent decades, a large number of Haitians have tried to flee the country’s poverty and political unrest. However, the boats of those trying to enter the United States illegally are intercepted. In the past, Haitian refugee claimants have been taken to the U.S base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to be processed. In Cuba they were pre-screened for refugee status in the United States. In recent years only a fraction of those intercepted at sea have been granted refugee status.
One of the options being heavily studied by Homeland Security involves the Migrant Operation Center at Guantanamo Bay. The Center could serve as a half-way point to screen those Haitians seeking asylum. The Center can be expanded to accommodate as many as 400 people at a time. However, this option will not be used unless a mass exodus occurs.
Aside from preparing for hypothetical situation, the United States government is putting most of its efforts in providing aid and relief to Haiti in the hope that improving the situation in Haiti so fewer people will feel compelled to leave.
http://visalaw.c.topica.com/maanKc9abVPqEboVcGUb/
-U.S. officials prepare for potential wave of Haitians
******
NY senator, FL pols call for TPS extension to Haitians
Politico reports that soon after the deadly earthquake experienced in Haiti, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand petitioned President Barack Obama to grant temporary protected status to Haitians living in United States. The junior Senator is urging President Obama to respond quickly by at least preventing Haitian citizens already in the United States from being deported to a ravaged country.
This call to domestic action is supported by previous responses by the United States government in the wake of other natural disasters in the Americas. In 1999, Honduran and Nicaraguan nationals were granted Temporary Protected Status in response to the devastating Hurricane Mitch, while in 2001 El Salvadorian citizens were granted the same status following several deadly earthquakes.
Senator Gillibrand also argues that the halt in Haitian deportation would allow Haitians in the US to earn money to send back home to help rebuild their country.
http://visalaw.c.topica.com/maanKc9abVPqDboVcGUb/
* * * * * *
US officials preparing for potential wave of Haitian immigration
Fox News is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security is preparing in case that there is a mass exodus from Haiti to the United States following this month’s deadly earthquake. Although the U.S Coast Guard has not reported any people fleeing to the United States since the earthquake, the Department of Homeland Security is evaluating options to respond to a large emigration wave from Haiti.
In recent decades, a large number of Haitians have tried to flee the country’s poverty and political unrest. However, the boats of those trying to enter the United States illegally are intercepted. In the past, Haitian refugee claimants have been taken to the U.S base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to be processed. In Cuba they were pre-screened for refugee status in the United States. In recent years only a fraction of those intercepted at sea have been granted refugee status.
One of the options being heavily studied by Homeland Security involves the Migrant Operation Center at Guantanamo Bay. The Center could serve as a half-way point to screen those Haitians seeking asylum. The Center can be expanded to accommodate as many as 400 people at a time. However, this option will not be used unless a mass exodus occurs.
Aside from preparing for hypothetical situation, the United States government is putting most of its efforts in providing aid and relief to Haiti in the hope that improving the situation in Haiti so fewer people will feel compelled to leave.
http://visalaw.c.topica.com/maanKc9abVPqEboVcGUb/
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
Girl pulled out alive 15 days after Haiti quake
by doug » Thu Jan 28, 2010 12:35 am
updated 8:57 p.m. ET Jan. 27, 2010
Girl pulled out alive 15 days after Haiti quake
Teenager was under rubble of home that collapsed in Port-au-Prince
msnbc.com news services
PORT-AU-PRINCE - French rescuers pulled a teenage girl from the rubble of a home near the destroyed St. Gerard University on Wednesday, a stunning recovery 15 days after an earthquake devastated the city.
Darlene Etienne, near death from dehydration and a broken leg, was rushed to a French military field hospital and then to a hospital ship, groaning through an oxygen mask with her eyes open in a lost stare.
"She's alive!" said paramedic Paul Francois-Valette, who accompanied her into the hospital.
Her family said Etienne had just started studying when the disaster struck, trapping dozens of students and staff in the rubble of school buildings, hostels and nearby homes.
"We thought she was dead," her cousin, Jocelyn A. St. Jules, said in a telephone call.
A voice from the rubble
Then — half a month after the earthquake — neighbors on Wednesday heard a voice weakly calling from the rubble of a private home down the road from the collapsed university. They called authorities, who brought in the French civil response team.
Rescuer Claude Fuilla walked along the dangerously crumbled roof, heard the voice and then saw a little bit of dust-covered black hair in the rubble. He said he cleared some debris, managed to reach the young woman and could see she was alive.
"She couldn't really talk to us or say how long she'd been there but I think she'd been there since the earthquake. I don't think she could have survived even a few more hours," Fuilla said.
Digging out a hole big enough to give her oxygen and water, they found she had a very weak pulse. Within 45 minutes they managed to remove her, covered in dust. Fuilla said she was rescued from what appeared to be the porch area of the house, but a neighbor said he believed it was the shower room, where she might have had access to water.
"It's exceptional. She spoke to us in a very little voice; she was extremely weak," Fuilla said. "Before we stabilized her she was extremely dehydrated and weak. She had a very low blood pressure."
Etienne did mumble something about having a little Coca-Cola with her in the rubble, he said. While Fuilla said she was rescued from what appeared to be the porch area of the house, a neighbor said he believed it was the shower room, where she might have had access to water.
Looking for more survivors
Another rescuer, French Lt. Col. Christophe Renou, said that Etienne's blood pressure was extremely low — and that he had no idea how she had managed to cling to life so long. "Definitely she's been here for 15 days," and "was very, very weak," he said.
Capt. Paul Courbin, leader of the French rescue team, said the teenager had a broken left leg.
Renou said his team would probably return Thursday with radar equipment to look for any other possible survivors.
French Ambassador Didier le Bret praised the persistence of the French rescue team, which has kept looking for survivors for days after the Haitian government officially called off the search.
"They are so stubborn because they should not have been working anymore because, officially, the rescue phase is over. But they felt that some lives still are to be saved, so we did not say that they should leave the country," he told Associated Press Television News.
"To be honest we thought that the last miracle we had a couple of days ago ... would be the last miracle because the chances are so very, very slight. But it seems that beyond the miracle, there was another miracle."
At least 135 people have been unearthed by rescue teams since the Jan. 12 quake, and many more by relatives and neighbors. But most of these rescues were in the immediate aftermath and authorities say it is rare for anyone to survive more than 72 hours without water.
The last previous confirmed rescue of someone trapped by the initial quake occurred Saturday, 11 days later, when a man was extricated from the ruins of a hotel grocery store.
Man survives
On Tuesday, rescuers pulled a man from the rubble of a downtown store. He later said he had been trapped since one of the quake's early aftershocks.
The man, identified by Reuters as Rico Dibrivell, was covered in dust and dressed only in underpants when he was carried out from the ruins of a building in downtown Port-au-Prince.
The U.S. military confirmed that soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, N.C., rescued a Haitian man in his 30s two blocks from the Port-au-Prince Cathedral on Rue de Miracle.
The victim had a broken leg and severe dehydration. He was evacuated to a nearby U.S. medical assistance team for treatment, a U.S. military statement said.
The magnitude-7.0 earthquake that struck two weeks ago killed as many as 200,000 people. Most authorities had given up hope this week finding any more survivors and were focusing relief efforts on getting help to hundreds of thousands of survivors left homeless, hungry and injured.
Praying under rubble
On Saturday, a man identified as Wismond Exantus, 22, was extricated after spending 11 days under the rubble in Port-au-Prince. Exantus told The Associated Press from his cot in a French field hospital on Sunday that the first thing he wanted to do was find a church to give thanks.
He said he spent the 11 days buried in the ruins of a hotel grocery store praying, reciting psalms and sleeping. "I wasn't afraid because I knew they were searching and would come for me," he said.
Haiti's government has declared an end to basic search operations for the living, shifting the focus to caring for the thousands surviving in squalid, makeshift camps.
© 2010 msnbc.com
Girl pulled out alive 15 days after Haiti quake
Teenager was under rubble of home that collapsed in Port-au-Prince
msnbc.com news services
PORT-AU-PRINCE - French rescuers pulled a teenage girl from the rubble of a home near the destroyed St. Gerard University on Wednesday, a stunning recovery 15 days after an earthquake devastated the city.
Darlene Etienne, near death from dehydration and a broken leg, was rushed to a French military field hospital and then to a hospital ship, groaning through an oxygen mask with her eyes open in a lost stare.
"She's alive!" said paramedic Paul Francois-Valette, who accompanied her into the hospital.
Her family said Etienne had just started studying when the disaster struck, trapping dozens of students and staff in the rubble of school buildings, hostels and nearby homes.
"We thought she was dead," her cousin, Jocelyn A. St. Jules, said in a telephone call.
A voice from the rubble
Then — half a month after the earthquake — neighbors on Wednesday heard a voice weakly calling from the rubble of a private home down the road from the collapsed university. They called authorities, who brought in the French civil response team.
Rescuer Claude Fuilla walked along the dangerously crumbled roof, heard the voice and then saw a little bit of dust-covered black hair in the rubble. He said he cleared some debris, managed to reach the young woman and could see she was alive.
"She couldn't really talk to us or say how long she'd been there but I think she'd been there since the earthquake. I don't think she could have survived even a few more hours," Fuilla said.
Digging out a hole big enough to give her oxygen and water, they found she had a very weak pulse. Within 45 minutes they managed to remove her, covered in dust. Fuilla said she was rescued from what appeared to be the porch area of the house, but a neighbor said he believed it was the shower room, where she might have had access to water.
"It's exceptional. She spoke to us in a very little voice; she was extremely weak," Fuilla said. "Before we stabilized her she was extremely dehydrated and weak. She had a very low blood pressure."
Etienne did mumble something about having a little Coca-Cola with her in the rubble, he said. While Fuilla said she was rescued from what appeared to be the porch area of the house, a neighbor said he believed it was the shower room, where she might have had access to water.
Looking for more survivors
Another rescuer, French Lt. Col. Christophe Renou, said that Etienne's blood pressure was extremely low — and that he had no idea how she had managed to cling to life so long. "Definitely she's been here for 15 days," and "was very, very weak," he said.
Capt. Paul Courbin, leader of the French rescue team, said the teenager had a broken left leg.
Renou said his team would probably return Thursday with radar equipment to look for any other possible survivors.
French Ambassador Didier le Bret praised the persistence of the French rescue team, which has kept looking for survivors for days after the Haitian government officially called off the search.
"They are so stubborn because they should not have been working anymore because, officially, the rescue phase is over. But they felt that some lives still are to be saved, so we did not say that they should leave the country," he told Associated Press Television News.
"To be honest we thought that the last miracle we had a couple of days ago ... would be the last miracle because the chances are so very, very slight. But it seems that beyond the miracle, there was another miracle."
At least 135 people have been unearthed by rescue teams since the Jan. 12 quake, and many more by relatives and neighbors. But most of these rescues were in the immediate aftermath and authorities say it is rare for anyone to survive more than 72 hours without water.
The last previous confirmed rescue of someone trapped by the initial quake occurred Saturday, 11 days later, when a man was extricated from the ruins of a hotel grocery store.
Man survives
On Tuesday, rescuers pulled a man from the rubble of a downtown store. He later said he had been trapped since one of the quake's early aftershocks.
The man, identified by Reuters as Rico Dibrivell, was covered in dust and dressed only in underpants when he was carried out from the ruins of a building in downtown Port-au-Prince.
The U.S. military confirmed that soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, N.C., rescued a Haitian man in his 30s two blocks from the Port-au-Prince Cathedral on Rue de Miracle.
The victim had a broken leg and severe dehydration. He was evacuated to a nearby U.S. medical assistance team for treatment, a U.S. military statement said.
The magnitude-7.0 earthquake that struck two weeks ago killed as many as 200,000 people. Most authorities had given up hope this week finding any more survivors and were focusing relief efforts on getting help to hundreds of thousands of survivors left homeless, hungry and injured.
Praying under rubble
On Saturday, a man identified as Wismond Exantus, 22, was extricated after spending 11 days under the rubble in Port-au-Prince. Exantus told The Associated Press from his cot in a French field hospital on Sunday that the first thing he wanted to do was find a church to give thanks.
He said he spent the 11 days buried in the ruins of a hotel grocery store praying, reciting psalms and sleeping. "I wasn't afraid because I knew they were searching and would come for me," he said.
Haiti's government has declared an end to basic search operations for the living, shifting the focus to caring for the thousands surviving in squalid, makeshift camps.
© 2010 msnbc.com
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
Haiti amputees face desperate quest for limbs
by doug » Thu Jan 28, 2010 11:15 am
updated 8:30 a.m. ET Jan. 28, 2010
Haiti amputees face desperate quest for limbs
Prosthetics groups promise help in a land where disability can mean death
Doctors at Good Samaritan Hospital in Jimani, Dominican Republic, had to amputate 4-year-old Schneily Similien’s lower leg because of injuries suffered in the Haiti earthquake. His father, Ducarmel Similien, says he will do whatever it takes to get a prosthetic leg for his boy.
By JoNel Aleccia
Health writer
By the time 4-year-old Schneily Similien’s parents got him to a doctor, it was too late to save his left leg.
The Haitian boy was hurt in the Jan. 12 magnitude-7 earthquake that killed at least 200,000 people and injured at least that many more. As the ground shook his family’s Port-au-Prince home, pieces of concrete ceiling came down on Schneily and his mother, Darline Similien, a 37-year-old kindergarten teacher. One large chunk crushed the child’s leg.
But after five days of searching in vain for medical care, the family had to travel to Good Samaritan Hospital in Jimani, about 45 miles away in the Dominican Republic. There, doctors had to choose between preserving the boy’s limb — or saving his life.
“I would rather have my son with one leg than to not have my son at all,” Schneily’s father, Ducarmel Similien, a 40-year-old carpenter, said through an interpreter for World Vision, a Christian humanitarian organization who relayed the story to msnbc.com. World Vision workers have been providing basic supplies to quake victims and volunteering in medical clinics at the Haitian border.
Schneily is among growing numbers of earthquake amputees created by the disaster. Estimates of amputations have varied dramatically — from a few thousand to more than 110,000, according to agency reports. There's no reliable count amid the chaos so far, but even the most conservative disaster workers say more than 75 people a day have lost limbs since the quake, either because of initial injuries or because of secondary infections and gangrene.
“This is already an unusually high number of amputations even for this kind of an earthquake,” said Wendy Batson, executive director of Handicap International, an aid group with global experience helping amputees and other disabled people. Her organization expects to see as many as 4,000 amputees when final counts are done.
In past quakes of similar magnitude, amputees have numbered in the hundreds, not in the thousands, Batson said. But the carnage in Port-au-Prince has been worse, partly because the quake was centered near the city of 2 million, partly because of erratic building construction standards, and partly because so many health and aid agencies were destroyed by the tremors.
Largest-ever loss of limbs?
The rising toll has triggered a call to action for prosthetics manufacturers and suppliers and amputee advocates in the U.S., who say the incident may represent the largest-ever loss of limbs in a single natural disaster.
“We’ve seen many amputees, but nowhere near the magnitude of this,” said Ivan R. Sabel, chairman of Hanger Prosthetics and Orthotics, the largest supplier in the U.S. “These folks are going to need ongoing care.”
Already, aid groups are raising money, collecting donations of used prosthetics and making plans to send teams of doctors, limb fitters and physical therapists to Haiti.
Last weekend, more than 300 cars loaded with wheelchairs, walkers, crutches and artificial limbs lined up in a parking lot at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., where organizers for the agency Physicians for Peace collected the mobility devices to be refurbished and sent to Haiti, said Ron Sconyers, the group’s president and chief executive.
“A gentleman came by and had tears in his eyes,” recalled Sconyers. “He said, ‘My wife died last month; this is her wheelchair. I know it will help someone have a better life.’”
Across the country, Hanger Prosthetics outlets are also collecting used devices.
On the ground in Port-au-Prince, Healing Hands for Haiti, a non-governmental organization with a decade of experience in the country, may be forced to rapidly double or triple its capacity to provide help for a disabled population that numbered 800,000 even before the quake.
“We’re going as fast as our feet can carry us,” said Eric Doubt, the agency’s executive director.
Healing first, then prosthetics
It’s still too early for earthquake victims to receive artificial limbs, said Pat Chelf, a board member for the Amputee Coalition of America, an education and advocacy group. Under the best circumstances, amputation injuries take a month or more to heal, and the conditions in Haiti are anything but the best.
Some patients had limbs sheared by the force of collapsed buildings or falling debris. Others had to sacrifice arms and legs when rescuers couldn’t free them any other way. Others lost fractured limbs because infection set in before they could be properly repaired.
In some cases, emergency operations were performed with chainsaws, with none of the usual thought about preserving nerves, flesh and function.
“There’s no way that these people had their surgical intervention optimized,” Chelf said.
From initial fittings and supply of prosthetics to ongoing adjustments, repairs and replacements, the demand for artificial limbs will be intense, expensive — and long-lasting, said Chelf.
Each device could cost between $4,000 and $6,000 per amputee, Chelf estimated. In the U.S., a new amputee can expect a minimum of four fittings a year to make sure the device is comfortable and works properly. In addition, several physical therapy sessions are necessary to help patients learn to adjust the way they walk and other body movements to use the new limbs.
“You have to be taught to use the device,” Chelf said. “You don’t just put it on and go.”
Some groups plan to make it easier and cheaper for amputees in Haiti and other developing countries to get limbs by setting up small shops where prosthetics can be made locally instead of being sent from abroad.
“For us, the issue is, when we walk away from this, it’s a long-lasting effect,” said Roger Gonzalez, executive director of Legs for All, a prosthetics development project at LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas.
An engineering professor, Gonzalez has created a durable, easy-to-make artificial leg that is fashioned of hard plastic and can be repaired with nuts and bolts from a hardware store. It costs about $15 to make, compared to about $2,000 for the cheapest leg in the U.S., and it can withstand the rugged geography and the dirt, heat and humidity of a place like Haiti.
“You have to have a knee that’s pretty robust,” says Gonzalez, who already operates programs in Sierra Leone, Bangladesh and Senegal.
Disabled can become pariahs
Making prosthetics cheap, repairable and widely available will be the only way to prevent Haitian amputees from becoming additional casualties of the killer quake. In a country where life is harsh at best, the disabled are often regarded as economic burdens and social pariahs, said Eric Doubt of Healing Hands for Haiti.
“The disabled and handicapped are pretty much neglected and abandoned,” he said.
That’s a view echoed by Schneily Similien’s father, who is just starting to contemplate his son’s future.
“There is a stigma with losing a limb; people tend not to take into account the needs of disabled people and it changes your life,” Ducarmel Similien told World Vision. “They don’t consider you a whole person.”
Acquiring replacement limbs may well be a matter of survival for children like Schneily as well as adults who lost arms or legs in the earthquake’s aftermath. Doctors in Jimani have told Schneily’s parents it could take up to three months to acquire a prosthetic leg for the boy. The parents say they’ll do whatever it takes to get one.
“I don’t want to think about the difficulties he might face right now,” the child’s father said. “He will have to work hard, but it’s already done. We just have to accept it and move on.”
© 2010 msnbc.com
Haiti amputees face desperate quest for limbs
Prosthetics groups promise help in a land where disability can mean death
Doctors at Good Samaritan Hospital in Jimani, Dominican Republic, had to amputate 4-year-old Schneily Similien’s lower leg because of injuries suffered in the Haiti earthquake. His father, Ducarmel Similien, says he will do whatever it takes to get a prosthetic leg for his boy.
By JoNel Aleccia
Health writer
By the time 4-year-old Schneily Similien’s parents got him to a doctor, it was too late to save his left leg.
The Haitian boy was hurt in the Jan. 12 magnitude-7 earthquake that killed at least 200,000 people and injured at least that many more. As the ground shook his family’s Port-au-Prince home, pieces of concrete ceiling came down on Schneily and his mother, Darline Similien, a 37-year-old kindergarten teacher. One large chunk crushed the child’s leg.
But after five days of searching in vain for medical care, the family had to travel to Good Samaritan Hospital in Jimani, about 45 miles away in the Dominican Republic. There, doctors had to choose between preserving the boy’s limb — or saving his life.
“I would rather have my son with one leg than to not have my son at all,” Schneily’s father, Ducarmel Similien, a 40-year-old carpenter, said through an interpreter for World Vision, a Christian humanitarian organization who relayed the story to msnbc.com. World Vision workers have been providing basic supplies to quake victims and volunteering in medical clinics at the Haitian border.
Schneily is among growing numbers of earthquake amputees created by the disaster. Estimates of amputations have varied dramatically — from a few thousand to more than 110,000, according to agency reports. There's no reliable count amid the chaos so far, but even the most conservative disaster workers say more than 75 people a day have lost limbs since the quake, either because of initial injuries or because of secondary infections and gangrene.
“This is already an unusually high number of amputations even for this kind of an earthquake,” said Wendy Batson, executive director of Handicap International, an aid group with global experience helping amputees and other disabled people. Her organization expects to see as many as 4,000 amputees when final counts are done.
In past quakes of similar magnitude, amputees have numbered in the hundreds, not in the thousands, Batson said. But the carnage in Port-au-Prince has been worse, partly because the quake was centered near the city of 2 million, partly because of erratic building construction standards, and partly because so many health and aid agencies were destroyed by the tremors.
Largest-ever loss of limbs?
The rising toll has triggered a call to action for prosthetics manufacturers and suppliers and amputee advocates in the U.S., who say the incident may represent the largest-ever loss of limbs in a single natural disaster.
“We’ve seen many amputees, but nowhere near the magnitude of this,” said Ivan R. Sabel, chairman of Hanger Prosthetics and Orthotics, the largest supplier in the U.S. “These folks are going to need ongoing care.”
Already, aid groups are raising money, collecting donations of used prosthetics and making plans to send teams of doctors, limb fitters and physical therapists to Haiti.
Last weekend, more than 300 cars loaded with wheelchairs, walkers, crutches and artificial limbs lined up in a parking lot at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., where organizers for the agency Physicians for Peace collected the mobility devices to be refurbished and sent to Haiti, said Ron Sconyers, the group’s president and chief executive.
“A gentleman came by and had tears in his eyes,” recalled Sconyers. “He said, ‘My wife died last month; this is her wheelchair. I know it will help someone have a better life.’”
Across the country, Hanger Prosthetics outlets are also collecting used devices.
On the ground in Port-au-Prince, Healing Hands for Haiti, a non-governmental organization with a decade of experience in the country, may be forced to rapidly double or triple its capacity to provide help for a disabled population that numbered 800,000 even before the quake.
“We’re going as fast as our feet can carry us,” said Eric Doubt, the agency’s executive director.
Healing first, then prosthetics
It’s still too early for earthquake victims to receive artificial limbs, said Pat Chelf, a board member for the Amputee Coalition of America, an education and advocacy group. Under the best circumstances, amputation injuries take a month or more to heal, and the conditions in Haiti are anything but the best.
Some patients had limbs sheared by the force of collapsed buildings or falling debris. Others had to sacrifice arms and legs when rescuers couldn’t free them any other way. Others lost fractured limbs because infection set in before they could be properly repaired.
In some cases, emergency operations were performed with chainsaws, with none of the usual thought about preserving nerves, flesh and function.
“There’s no way that these people had their surgical intervention optimized,” Chelf said.
From initial fittings and supply of prosthetics to ongoing adjustments, repairs and replacements, the demand for artificial limbs will be intense, expensive — and long-lasting, said Chelf.
Each device could cost between $4,000 and $6,000 per amputee, Chelf estimated. In the U.S., a new amputee can expect a minimum of four fittings a year to make sure the device is comfortable and works properly. In addition, several physical therapy sessions are necessary to help patients learn to adjust the way they walk and other body movements to use the new limbs.
“You have to be taught to use the device,” Chelf said. “You don’t just put it on and go.”
Some groups plan to make it easier and cheaper for amputees in Haiti and other developing countries to get limbs by setting up small shops where prosthetics can be made locally instead of being sent from abroad.
“For us, the issue is, when we walk away from this, it’s a long-lasting effect,” said Roger Gonzalez, executive director of Legs for All, a prosthetics development project at LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas.
An engineering professor, Gonzalez has created a durable, easy-to-make artificial leg that is fashioned of hard plastic and can be repaired with nuts and bolts from a hardware store. It costs about $15 to make, compared to about $2,000 for the cheapest leg in the U.S., and it can withstand the rugged geography and the dirt, heat and humidity of a place like Haiti.
“You have to have a knee that’s pretty robust,” says Gonzalez, who already operates programs in Sierra Leone, Bangladesh and Senegal.
Disabled can become pariahs
Making prosthetics cheap, repairable and widely available will be the only way to prevent Haitian amputees from becoming additional casualties of the killer quake. In a country where life is harsh at best, the disabled are often regarded as economic burdens and social pariahs, said Eric Doubt of Healing Hands for Haiti.
“The disabled and handicapped are pretty much neglected and abandoned,” he said.
That’s a view echoed by Schneily Similien’s father, who is just starting to contemplate his son’s future.
“There is a stigma with losing a limb; people tend not to take into account the needs of disabled people and it changes your life,” Ducarmel Similien told World Vision. “They don’t consider you a whole person.”
Acquiring replacement limbs may well be a matter of survival for children like Schneily as well as adults who lost arms or legs in the earthquake’s aftermath. Doctors in Jimani have told Schneily’s parents it could take up to three months to acquire a prosthetic leg for the boy. The parents say they’ll do whatever it takes to get one.
“I don’t want to think about the difficulties he might face right now,” the child’s father said. “He will have to work hard, but it’s already done. We just have to accept it and move on.”
© 2010 msnbc.com
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
NYT: Cost dispute halts airlift of Haiti victims
by doug » Sat Jan 30, 2010 8:50 am
updated 6:46 a.m. ET Jan. 30, 2010
NYT: Cost dispute halts airlift of Haiti victims
‘People are dying ... because they can’t get out,’ says official for aid group
A child awaits for the distribution of meals by WFP (United Nations World Food Programme) in a make-shift camp in Jacmel January 28, 2010. An earthquake on January 12 killed some 200,000 people and devastated the impoverished country.
By Shaila Dewan
The New York Times
MIAMI - The United States has suspended its medical evacuations of critically injured Haitian earthquake victims until a dispute over who will pay for their care is settled, military officials said Friday.
The military flights, usually C-130s carrying Haitians with spinal cord injuries, burns and other serious wounds, ended on Wednesday after Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida formally asked the federal government to shoulder some of the cost of the care.
Hospitals in Florida have treated more than 500 earthquake victims so far, the military said, including an infant who was pulled out of the rubble with a fractured skull and ribs. Other states have taken patients, too, and those flights have been suspended as well, the officials said.
The suspension could be catastrophic for patients, said Dr. Barth A. Green, the co-founder of Project Medishare for Haiti, a nonprofit group affiliated with the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine that had been evacuating about two dozen patients a day.
“People are dying in Haiti because they can’t get out,” Dr. Green said.
It was not clear on Friday who exactly was responsible for the interruption of flights, or the chain of events that led to the decision. Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for Mr. Crist, said the governor’s request for federal help might have caused “confusion.”
“Florida stands ready to assist our neighbors in Haiti, but we need a plan of action and reimbursement for the care we are providing,” Mr. Ivey said.
Mr. Crist’s request did not indicate how much the medical care was costing the State of Florida, but the number and complexity of the cases could put the total in the millions of dollars. The expenditure comes at a time when the state is suffering economically and Mr. Crist, a Republican, is locked in a tough primary battle for the Senate seat that had been held by Mel Martinez.
“Recently, we learned that plans were under way to move between 30 to 50 critically ill patients a day for an indefinite period of time,” Mr. Crist wrote in a letter to Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services. “Florida does not have the capacity to support such an operation.”
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services said the decision to suspend the flights was made by the military, not the federal health department. A military spokesman said that the military had ended the flights because hospitals were becoming unwilling to take patients.
“The places they were being taken, without being specific, were not willing to continue to receive those patients without a different arrangement being worked out by the government to pay for the care,” said Maj. James Lowe, the deputy chief of public affairs for the United States Transportation Command.
Florida officials, meanwhile, said the state’s hospitals had not refused to take more patients. Jeanne Eckes-Roper, the health and medical chairwoman of the domestic security task force for the South Florida region — where the Super Bowl will be played on Feb. 7 — said she had requested only that new patients be taken to other areas of the state, like Tampa.
The Health and Human Services spokeswoman, Gretchen Michael, who works for the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, said the agency was reviewing Mr. Crist’s request for financial assistance. The request would involve activating the National Disaster Medical System, which is usually used in domestic disasters and which pays for victims’ care.
Some of the patients being airlifted from Haiti are American citizens and some are insured or eligible for insurance. But Haitians who are not legal residents of the United States can qualify for Medicaid only if they are given so-called humanitarian parole — in which someone is allowed into the United States temporarily because of an emergency — by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Only 34 people have been given humanitarian parole for medical reasons, said Matthew Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. The National Disaster Medical System, if activated, would cover the costs of caring for patients regardless of their legal status.
Some hospitals have made their own arrangements to accommodate victims of the earthquake, which occurred on Jan. 12. Jackson Health System, the public hospital system in Miami, treated 117 patients, 6 of whom were still in critical condition, said Jennifer Piedra, a spokeswoman. The system has established the Haiti’s Children Fund to cover the costs of treating pediatric earthquake victims.
In the aftermath of the earthquake, Haitian medical facilities were quickly overwhelmed. Since then, medical help has come in the form of mobile hospitals and other aid. Major Lowe said that as medical care had become available in Haiti, the need for the flights had declined significantly. But Dr. Green and nonprofit groups with a presence in Haiti said the need for evacuations remained dire.
“Right now we have in the queue dozens of paraplegics, burn victims and other patients that need to be evacuated,” Dr. Green said. “And other facilities are asking us to coordinate the evacuation of their patients.”
A spokeswoman for Partners in Health, a Boston charity with doctors and nurses in Haiti, said the group had a backlog of patients, many with head, spine or pelvic injuries, who needed surgery that could not be performed there.
Major Lowe said patients could still be evacuated in private planes, but Dr. Green said medically equipped planes were very expensive and generally could carry only one or two patients.
Federal officials could not provide the total number of earthquake patients airlifted to the United States, but Florida seemed to have received the bulk of them.
In his letter, Mr. Crist outlined his state’s efforts to support the rescue effort, helping both the healthy and the sick streaming into the state. “Florida’s health care system is quickly reaching saturation,” he wrote.
This story, "Cost Dispute Halts Airlift of Injured Haiti Quake Victims," originally appeared in The New York Times.
Copyright © 2010 The New York Times
NYT: Cost dispute halts airlift of Haiti victims
‘People are dying ... because they can’t get out,’ says official for aid group
A child awaits for the distribution of meals by WFP (United Nations World Food Programme) in a make-shift camp in Jacmel January 28, 2010. An earthquake on January 12 killed some 200,000 people and devastated the impoverished country.
By Shaila Dewan
The New York Times
MIAMI - The United States has suspended its medical evacuations of critically injured Haitian earthquake victims until a dispute over who will pay for their care is settled, military officials said Friday.
The military flights, usually C-130s carrying Haitians with spinal cord injuries, burns and other serious wounds, ended on Wednesday after Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida formally asked the federal government to shoulder some of the cost of the care.
Hospitals in Florida have treated more than 500 earthquake victims so far, the military said, including an infant who was pulled out of the rubble with a fractured skull and ribs. Other states have taken patients, too, and those flights have been suspended as well, the officials said.
The suspension could be catastrophic for patients, said Dr. Barth A. Green, the co-founder of Project Medishare for Haiti, a nonprofit group affiliated with the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine that had been evacuating about two dozen patients a day.
“People are dying in Haiti because they can’t get out,” Dr. Green said.
It was not clear on Friday who exactly was responsible for the interruption of flights, or the chain of events that led to the decision. Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for Mr. Crist, said the governor’s request for federal help might have caused “confusion.”
“Florida stands ready to assist our neighbors in Haiti, but we need a plan of action and reimbursement for the care we are providing,” Mr. Ivey said.
Mr. Crist’s request did not indicate how much the medical care was costing the State of Florida, but the number and complexity of the cases could put the total in the millions of dollars. The expenditure comes at a time when the state is suffering economically and Mr. Crist, a Republican, is locked in a tough primary battle for the Senate seat that had been held by Mel Martinez.
“Recently, we learned that plans were under way to move between 30 to 50 critically ill patients a day for an indefinite period of time,” Mr. Crist wrote in a letter to Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services. “Florida does not have the capacity to support such an operation.”
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services said the decision to suspend the flights was made by the military, not the federal health department. A military spokesman said that the military had ended the flights because hospitals were becoming unwilling to take patients.
“The places they were being taken, without being specific, were not willing to continue to receive those patients without a different arrangement being worked out by the government to pay for the care,” said Maj. James Lowe, the deputy chief of public affairs for the United States Transportation Command.
Florida officials, meanwhile, said the state’s hospitals had not refused to take more patients. Jeanne Eckes-Roper, the health and medical chairwoman of the domestic security task force for the South Florida region — where the Super Bowl will be played on Feb. 7 — said she had requested only that new patients be taken to other areas of the state, like Tampa.
The Health and Human Services spokeswoman, Gretchen Michael, who works for the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, said the agency was reviewing Mr. Crist’s request for financial assistance. The request would involve activating the National Disaster Medical System, which is usually used in domestic disasters and which pays for victims’ care.
Some of the patients being airlifted from Haiti are American citizens and some are insured or eligible for insurance. But Haitians who are not legal residents of the United States can qualify for Medicaid only if they are given so-called humanitarian parole — in which someone is allowed into the United States temporarily because of an emergency — by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Only 34 people have been given humanitarian parole for medical reasons, said Matthew Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. The National Disaster Medical System, if activated, would cover the costs of caring for patients regardless of their legal status.
Some hospitals have made their own arrangements to accommodate victims of the earthquake, which occurred on Jan. 12. Jackson Health System, the public hospital system in Miami, treated 117 patients, 6 of whom were still in critical condition, said Jennifer Piedra, a spokeswoman. The system has established the Haiti’s Children Fund to cover the costs of treating pediatric earthquake victims.
In the aftermath of the earthquake, Haitian medical facilities were quickly overwhelmed. Since then, medical help has come in the form of mobile hospitals and other aid. Major Lowe said that as medical care had become available in Haiti, the need for the flights had declined significantly. But Dr. Green and nonprofit groups with a presence in Haiti said the need for evacuations remained dire.
“Right now we have in the queue dozens of paraplegics, burn victims and other patients that need to be evacuated,” Dr. Green said. “And other facilities are asking us to coordinate the evacuation of their patients.”
A spokeswoman for Partners in Health, a Boston charity with doctors and nurses in Haiti, said the group had a backlog of patients, many with head, spine or pelvic injuries, who needed surgery that could not be performed there.
Major Lowe said patients could still be evacuated in private planes, but Dr. Green said medically equipped planes were very expensive and generally could carry only one or two patients.
Federal officials could not provide the total number of earthquake patients airlifted to the United States, but Florida seemed to have received the bulk of them.
In his letter, Mr. Crist outlined his state’s efforts to support the rescue effort, helping both the healthy and the sick streaming into the state. “Florida’s health care system is quickly reaching saturation,” he wrote.
This story, "Cost Dispute Halts Airlift of Injured Haiti Quake Victims," originally appeared in The New York Times.
Copyright © 2010 The New York Times
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
10 Americans held in Haiti; tried to move kids
by doug » Sat Jan 30, 2010 5:26 pm
updated 6:32 p.m. ET Jan. 30, 2010
10 Americans held in Haiti; tried to move kids
Members of U.S. group claim it’s case of missing documents, not trafficking
NBC News and news services
PORT-AU-PRINCE - Haitian police arrested 10 U.S. citizens after they tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the earthquake-stricken nation, authorities said on Saturday.
The five men and five women were in custody in Port-au-Prince after their arrests on Friday evening, Reuters reported. Their arrests followed fears that traffickers were trying to exploit the chaos and turmoil following Haiti's January 12 earthquake quake to engage in illegal adoptions.
The Americans told NBC News they were being charged with child trafficking, although they believe it was a misunderstanding regarding proper documentation.
One of the arrested women, who said she is leader of an Idaho-based charity called New Life Children's Refuge, denied of wrongdoing.
New Life members told NBC News that they had a signed letter from a Haitian pastor releasing the children to them, and they also had documentation from the Domician Republican government that was awaiting them at the border.
The suspects were detained at Malpasse, Haiti's main border crossing with the Dominican Republic, after Haitian police conducted a routine search of their vehicle.
Authorities maintained the Americans had no documents to prove they had cleared the adoption of the 33 children — aged 2 months to 12 years — through any embassy and no papers showing they were made orphans by the quake in the impoverished Caribbean country.
"This is totally illegal," said Yves Cristalin, Haiti's social affairs minister told Reuters. "No children can leave Haiti without proper authorization and these people did not have that authorization."
The children were moved to another orphanage in Haiti, while the New Life delegation remained in jail awaiting word from the U.S. embassy.
U.S. authorities could not be reached for immediate comment on the arrests.
Information available online for New Life Children's Refuge confirmed the names of the detained Americans and their mission to rescue orphans from Port-au-Prince and return them to an orphanage across the border.
NBC News' Don Wood and Michelle Kosinski contributed to this report, as did Reuters.
© 2010 MSNBC.com
10 Americans held in Haiti; tried to move kids
Members of U.S. group claim it’s case of missing documents, not trafficking
NBC News and news services
PORT-AU-PRINCE - Haitian police arrested 10 U.S. citizens after they tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the earthquake-stricken nation, authorities said on Saturday.
The five men and five women were in custody in Port-au-Prince after their arrests on Friday evening, Reuters reported. Their arrests followed fears that traffickers were trying to exploit the chaos and turmoil following Haiti's January 12 earthquake quake to engage in illegal adoptions.
The Americans told NBC News they were being charged with child trafficking, although they believe it was a misunderstanding regarding proper documentation.
One of the arrested women, who said she is leader of an Idaho-based charity called New Life Children's Refuge, denied of wrongdoing.
New Life members told NBC News that they had a signed letter from a Haitian pastor releasing the children to them, and they also had documentation from the Domician Republican government that was awaiting them at the border.
The suspects were detained at Malpasse, Haiti's main border crossing with the Dominican Republic, after Haitian police conducted a routine search of their vehicle.
Authorities maintained the Americans had no documents to prove they had cleared the adoption of the 33 children — aged 2 months to 12 years — through any embassy and no papers showing they were made orphans by the quake in the impoverished Caribbean country.
"This is totally illegal," said Yves Cristalin, Haiti's social affairs minister told Reuters. "No children can leave Haiti without proper authorization and these people did not have that authorization."
The children were moved to another orphanage in Haiti, while the New Life delegation remained in jail awaiting word from the U.S. embassy.
U.S. authorities could not be reached for immediate comment on the arrests.
Information available online for New Life Children's Refuge confirmed the names of the detained Americans and their mission to rescue orphans from Port-au-Prince and return them to an orphanage across the border.
NBC News' Don Wood and Michelle Kosinski contributed to this report, as did Reuters.
© 2010 MSNBC.com
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
Doctor: Haitians will die without U.S. airlifts
by doug » Sat Jan 30, 2010 5:28 pm
updated 5:40 p.m. ET Jan. 30, 2010
Doctor: Haitians will die without U.S. airlifts
U.S. military had stopped flying victims after cost dispute with Florida
U.S. Navy and Air Force personnel get ready to airlift a girl with head injuries to an offshore medical facility in Port-au-Prince in a Jan. 24 photo.
The Associated Press
MIAMI - The U.S. military has halted flights carrying Haitian earthquake victims to the United States because of an apparent cost dispute, and a doctor warned that some injured patients faced imminent death if the flights don't resume.
The evacuations were temporarily suspended Wednesday, said Capt. Kevin Aandahl, spokesman for U.S. Transportation Command. The flights were halted a day after Florida Gov. Charlie Crist asked the federal government to help pay for care. The halt was first reported by The New York Times.
However, Dr. Barth Green, a doctor involved in the relief effort in Port-au-Prince, warned that his patients needed to get to better hospitals.
"We have 100 critically ill patients who will die in the next day or two if we don't Medevac them," said Green, chairman of the University of Miami's Global Institute for Community Health and Development.
Dying of tetanus
At a temporary field hospital at Haiti's international airport, set up with donations to Green's institute, two men had already died of tetanus. Doctors said 5-year-old Betina Joseph faced a similar fate within 24 hours unless she is evacuated to a U.S. hospital where she can be put on a respirator.
The girl — infected with tetanus through a two-inch cut on her thigh — weakly shooed a fly buzzing around her face as her mother caressed, apparently unaware that getting the girl out could mean life or death.
"If we can't save her by getting her out right away, we won't save her," said Dr. David Pitcher, one of 34 surgeons staffing the field hospital.
There were some states that would not accept patients who needed care in the U.S., and they could not be transported without a hospital to accept them, Aandahl said.
Aandahl declined to specify which states declined to accept patients, and he referred further questions to a Pentagon press office, where an after-hours answering service could not accept incoming messages Saturday.
‘Reaching saturation’
Florida officials said Saturday that they were not aware of any hospital in Florida refusing to take in the patients. However, in a letter Tuesday to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the Republican governor said "Florida's health care system is quickly reaching saturation, especially in the area of high level trauma care."
Crist asked Sebelius to activate the National Disaster Medical System, which is typically used in domestic disasters and pays for victims' care. His letter did not indicate how much victims' care was costing Florida, though he noted the state's health care system was already stretched by the winter tourism season and annual "snowbird" migration of seniors from northern states and Canada.
In a statement Saturday, Crist said Florida has not stopped helping earthquake victims, noting at least 60 Haitian orphans arrived Friday night at Miami International Airport.
Those children already were being adopted by families in Utah, said Sterling Ivey, the governor's spokesman.
Crist said his state remains committed to caring for injured earthquake victims and reuniting families, though he was reaching out to other states to help care for them as well.
Can't handle them, Crist says
Crist's letter to Sebelius outlined Florida's relief efforts, including 436 patients admitted to hospitals. Nearly all those patients suffered multiple traumas, and a quarter of them were under the age of 18, the governor wrote.
"Recently we learned that federal planning is under way to move between 30-50 critically ill patients per day for an indefinite period of time," Crist told Sebelius, saying Florida could not handle such an endeavor.
More than 400 U.S. citizens, Haitian nationals and other foreign nationals have been treated at South Florida hospitals since the Jan. 12 earthquake, including 136 who remain hospitalized, said Jeanne Eckes-Roper, the health and medical chairwoman of a state domestic security task force for the South Florida region.
About 75 additional patients were flown to Tampa area hospitals after she requested on Monday that new patients be taken elsewhere in Florida, Eckes-Roper said.
"We had to make sure we did not overwhelm our capacity," she said. "We stand ready to take whatever the government wants to give us."
Aandahl said no evacuation requests have been made by U.S. military medical facilities in Haiti, including the hospital ship the USNS Comfort, since the flights were suspended Wednesday.
There were limited medical evacuations by the U.S. military after the Jan. 12 earthquake, he said.
"It wasn't a lot of flights — probably a dozen, maybe less, maybe more, but not a large number," Aandahl said.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Doctor: Haitians will die without U.S. airlifts
U.S. military had stopped flying victims after cost dispute with Florida
U.S. Navy and Air Force personnel get ready to airlift a girl with head injuries to an offshore medical facility in Port-au-Prince in a Jan. 24 photo.
The Associated Press
MIAMI - The U.S. military has halted flights carrying Haitian earthquake victims to the United States because of an apparent cost dispute, and a doctor warned that some injured patients faced imminent death if the flights don't resume.
The evacuations were temporarily suspended Wednesday, said Capt. Kevin Aandahl, spokesman for U.S. Transportation Command. The flights were halted a day after Florida Gov. Charlie Crist asked the federal government to help pay for care. The halt was first reported by The New York Times.
However, Dr. Barth Green, a doctor involved in the relief effort in Port-au-Prince, warned that his patients needed to get to better hospitals.
"We have 100 critically ill patients who will die in the next day or two if we don't Medevac them," said Green, chairman of the University of Miami's Global Institute for Community Health and Development.
Dying of tetanus
At a temporary field hospital at Haiti's international airport, set up with donations to Green's institute, two men had already died of tetanus. Doctors said 5-year-old Betina Joseph faced a similar fate within 24 hours unless she is evacuated to a U.S. hospital where she can be put on a respirator.
The girl — infected with tetanus through a two-inch cut on her thigh — weakly shooed a fly buzzing around her face as her mother caressed, apparently unaware that getting the girl out could mean life or death.
"If we can't save her by getting her out right away, we won't save her," said Dr. David Pitcher, one of 34 surgeons staffing the field hospital.
There were some states that would not accept patients who needed care in the U.S., and they could not be transported without a hospital to accept them, Aandahl said.
Aandahl declined to specify which states declined to accept patients, and he referred further questions to a Pentagon press office, where an after-hours answering service could not accept incoming messages Saturday.
‘Reaching saturation’
Florida officials said Saturday that they were not aware of any hospital in Florida refusing to take in the patients. However, in a letter Tuesday to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the Republican governor said "Florida's health care system is quickly reaching saturation, especially in the area of high level trauma care."
Crist asked Sebelius to activate the National Disaster Medical System, which is typically used in domestic disasters and pays for victims' care. His letter did not indicate how much victims' care was costing Florida, though he noted the state's health care system was already stretched by the winter tourism season and annual "snowbird" migration of seniors from northern states and Canada.
In a statement Saturday, Crist said Florida has not stopped helping earthquake victims, noting at least 60 Haitian orphans arrived Friday night at Miami International Airport.
Those children already were being adopted by families in Utah, said Sterling Ivey, the governor's spokesman.
Crist said his state remains committed to caring for injured earthquake victims and reuniting families, though he was reaching out to other states to help care for them as well.
Can't handle them, Crist says
Crist's letter to Sebelius outlined Florida's relief efforts, including 436 patients admitted to hospitals. Nearly all those patients suffered multiple traumas, and a quarter of them were under the age of 18, the governor wrote.
"Recently we learned that federal planning is under way to move between 30-50 critically ill patients per day for an indefinite period of time," Crist told Sebelius, saying Florida could not handle such an endeavor.
More than 400 U.S. citizens, Haitian nationals and other foreign nationals have been treated at South Florida hospitals since the Jan. 12 earthquake, including 136 who remain hospitalized, said Jeanne Eckes-Roper, the health and medical chairwoman of a state domestic security task force for the South Florida region.
About 75 additional patients were flown to Tampa area hospitals after she requested on Monday that new patients be taken elsewhere in Florida, Eckes-Roper said.
"We had to make sure we did not overwhelm our capacity," she said. "We stand ready to take whatever the government wants to give us."
Aandahl said no evacuation requests have been made by U.S. military medical facilities in Haiti, including the hospital ship the USNS Comfort, since the flights were suspended Wednesday.
There were limited medical evacuations by the U.S. military after the Jan. 12 earthquake, he said.
"It wasn't a lot of flights — probably a dozen, maybe less, maybe more, but not a large number," Aandahl said.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24817
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
67 posts
• Page 2 of 5 • 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Return to Douglas M. Holmes, Attorney, C.P.A. Bulletin Board
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: doug, Google [Bot] and 2 guests