CNS STORY: Church groups struggle to distribute aid; Dominican hospitals overflow

HAITI-BOTTLENECK Jan-19-2010 (890 words) With photos. xxxi

Church groups struggle to distribute aid; Dominican hospitals overflow

By David Agren
Catholic News Service

MEXICO CITY (CNS) -- A Mexican nun operating a medical center in Port-au-Prince said plenty of aid is arriving in the Haitian capital, but it is failing to reach many of those who were injured and left homeless by the Jan. 12 earthquake.

Meanwhile, church authorities in the Dominican Republic said Haitians were streaming across the border for medical treatment.

Mexican Sister Bertha Lopez, mother superior and founder of the Guadalajara-based Missionaries of the Risen Christ, said in a Jan. 17 report distributed by Caritas, "The airport is full of tents (and supplies) from every country, but the aid hasn't arrived."

On Jan. 18 she told Caritas in Mexico that little had changed since she wrote her report.

Sister Lopez said her clinic and Caritas offices in Haiti "are running out of resources" such as medical supplies, which she said is leading to deaths and extreme situations such as having to perform amputations without anesthetics.

"Perhaps we're despairing because due to the lack of treatment, people could become amputees and end up dying," she said. Her clinic, located outside Port-au-Prince's badly damaged cathedral, was being run in conjunction with Cuban workers.

A small planeload of medical supplies -- along with two surgeons -- from Caritas in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo arrived to resupply Sister Lopez's clinic Jan. 18. Omar Cortes, a church communications worker, spoke with Sister Lopez that same day and said bottlenecks at the airport only permitted a fraction of the supplies to be delivered to the makeshift clinic.

The report underscored the urgency of the situation in Haiti, where a magnitude 7 earthquake has claimed an estimated 200,000 lives, flattened many buildings in and around Port-au-Prince and left much of the federal government and national institutions in shambles and unable to respond.

The report also underscored the difficulty of delivering desperately needed assistance in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country because infrastructure was badly damaged and corpses littered the streets.

Caritas, the Vatican's charitable organization, said Jan. 18 on its Web site that it had been doing "small emergency distributions through parishes, but nothing large so far as it's difficult to identify appropriate sites and also carry out the assessments." It added that Caritas had set up two mobile surgical rooms and that 20 trucks carrying aid had arrived the previous day in Port-au-Prince.

Sister Lopez issued an urgent call for food, water and medical supplies such as syringes, sutures and antibiotics -- and even body bags and trucks to help rescue workers retrieve corpses from the streets.

"The dead are in the streets ... and in a bad state of putrefaction," she said.

Those needing help, Sister Lopez said, are being hindered by a deteriorating security situation in Port-au-Prince that has been marked by looting and violence.

"The Red Cross rescue workers are unable to go out because they don't have bodyguards," Sister Lopez said. She acknowledged a widespread concern about the insecure conditions in the evenings and the frequent aftershocks.

Sister Lopez traveled to Haiti Jan. 14 on a private jet donated by a Cancun hotel owner with a team of rescue workers -- the "Gophers" -- famous for digging through rubble and Father Jose Sandoval Tajonar, the Latin America and Caribbean regional director of Caritas.

Another two groups of rescue workers and surgeons from the Cancun area have since arrived in Haiti.

Jesuit Father Regino Martinez, director of the Jesuit immigrant aid group, Border Solidarity, in Dajabon, Dominican Republic, also spent several days immediately after the earthquake in Port-au-Prince to assess the situation.

"One curious thing," he said, "The houses of that have fallen down were solidly built houses for the middle class.

"The poor peoples' houses didn't fall down, but the majority of the impacted people are poor," he added, noting that they had relied on governmental and nongovernmental organizations for basic services such as water, health and education.

Father Martinez described conditions outside the Haitian capital as also being desperate and said, "All of the services that flow out of Port-au-Prince to the rest of the country have collapsed."

Dominican authorities have reopened the border 24 hours a day, after it was initially closed hours after the earthquake, and Father Martinez said many of the wounded Haitians were crossing over in search of medical treatment.

Further south, Wilma Duval Orozco, Caritas director in the Dominican Diocese of San Juan de la Maguana, said hospitals near the border were overflowing and shortages of fuel, food and medicine were common. She added that many Haitians who work as construction and farm laborers in the Dominican Republic were unable to get information about their loved ones back home.

Sugeiry Micher Sandoval, communications director for the Dominican bishops' conference, said the Dominican public and government have responded "very generously" to the earthquake, but that transporting supplies into Haiti had been difficult for church groups -- and others -- due to some hijackings of trucks and buses.

Father Sandoval said in comments on Caritas Web site the rebuilding process in Haiti will not be easy.

"The reconstruction of Port-au-Prince and the rest of the affected areas will be a Titanic job, in which the international community cannot feel relieved," he said.

Sister Lopez gave an equally tough prognosis.

"I see things being very difficult in the future," she said. "The majority of houses on any block have fallen down or have halfway fallen down."

END

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