23278: (Chamberlain) More peacekeepers sent to Gonaives (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

   By PAISLEY DODDS

   GONAIVES, Sept 27 (AP) -- The United Nations rushed hundreds more
peacekeepers in to stem looting in storm-ravaged Gonaives, while Haitians
gathered in a cathedral ankle-deep in mud and prayed for the 1,500 killed
by Tropical Storm Jeanne.
   The Brazilian general in charge of the U.N. force criticized the slow
pace of relief that is compounding the suffering of traumatized survivors.
   "The situation remains critical," Gen. Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira
said in an interview with the official Agencia Brasil.
   He said many people were suffering from diarrhea while others, many of
them children, were contracting gangrene. Amputations were being performed
under horrendous conditions, he said. Most injuries being treated are
gashes from collapsing roofs or pieces of zinc roof hidden by the mud that
still covers the city, where most survivors walk barefooted.
   Anne Poulsen of the U.N. World Food Program said relief agencies were
working around the clock trying to get food to victims -- even using
donkeys.
   When trucks carrying 8 tons of food from Cap-Haitien -- the port to the
north -- were blocked by mudslides, "we unloaded the food from trucks and
put it on to donkeys and mules to reach localities ... where people had not
eaten for a week" since the storm's passage, Poulsen said.
   WFP and CARE International distributed 120 tons of food in the past
three days -- enough to feed 48,000 families for one day, she said.
   The director of the WFP Haiti operation, Guy Gavreau, said floods from
Jeanne destroyed the rice and fruit harvest in the Artibonite, Haiti's
breadbasket, "so now the country can't even feed itself without outside
help."
   At the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Charles Borromee, four people
stood and prayed in the back, unwilling to venture into the disaster zone
of overturned pews and trash caked with ankle-deep mud. Outside, a woman
among hundreds sheltering at the church brushed her teeth and spat
toothpaste into the debris.
   A couple walked up, shoes newly waxed and shining, for Mass in a
makeshift chapel.
   "We don't have anything but we're doing our best," Joselyne Ashalus, 31,
said in front of a classroom where she sleeps on the floor with eight other
people.
   "After all this we have to be respectful and we have to thank God for
saving us," she said, grateful that the storm that destroyed their home
spared her five children
   Ashalus braided one daughter's hair and decorated it with pink and white
hair grips. Her other children stood nearby -- a baby with yellow
iodine-soaked bandages on both legs, a girl with one on her ankle and a
toddler covered in a rash.
   Sunday night, lightning bolts lit the blacked-out city, threatening a
thunderstorm that would add to the miseries of survivors living on
sidewalks and rooftops of flooded homes.
   Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue said Saturday the storm killed at
least 1,500 people.
   On Sunday, the civil defense agency's Abel Nazaire said more bodies were
recovered from debris in Gonaives, raising the number of corpses found to
1,330. Another 2,601 people were injured, and 1,056 are missing.
   Nazaire acknowledged many of the missing can be presumed dead -- washed
out to sea or under the rubble of collapsed homes in areas still
inaccessible.
   Some 300,000 people are homeless from the storm, including about 200,000
in Gonaives, he said.
   Latortue said the government was drawing up plans to evacuate some of
the homeless to a tent camp. Some victims, fearing the spread of disease,
said they would abandon the city, Haiti's third-largest with 250,000
residents.
   Planeloads of aid have arrived in Port-au-Prince, the capital, but
getting it to Gonaives is a nine-hour nightmare drive with the final leg of
the route covered by a 4-foot-deep lake of mud littered with mired aid
trucks.
   A truck that managed to get through Sunday morning was looted by
desperate residents. They threw out packets of water, sending children in
the streets dodging other aid trucks to grab the precious loot.
   Argentine soldiers finally shoved people screaming, "We're hungry!" back
from the truck.
   Some 140 Uruguayan soldiers were on their way to reinforce about 600
U.N. peacekeepers already in Gonaives, said Toussaint Kongo-Doudou,
spokesman for the U.N. mission. They were to have arrived Saturday.
   U.N. humanitarian relief coordinator Eric Mouillesarine said street
gangs were mobbing relief workers to steal food aid and "there's nothing we
can do."
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   On the Net:
   National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov
   Weather Underground storm site: http://www.wunderground.com/tropical
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   Associated Press reporters Amy Bracken and Michelle Faul contributed to
this report.