PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 9, 2010 (IPS) – Perched near the top of a steep hill, the fractured pink walls of Villa Manrese overlook the rest of the capital city. Both ends of the three-story compound have collapsed, spilling into mounds of rubble. The first floor was pulverised into a layer of dust. There are still bodies inside.

But in the adjacent garden behind the Catholic retreat, also known as Centre Saint-Viateur, life sprang anew after the Jan. 12 earthquake struck Haiti.

Some 250 families, comprising 1,500 people from the surrounding area of Haut-Turgeau, crowded together in the small field. Father Paul André Garraud, a Haitian priest based in the villa, helped procure tents, food, and medicine from relief agencies.

“We were doing well because they organised us. We weren’t hungry,” said Lubin Pierre-Louis, 52, leaning on a cane in the middle of the empty field. Three boys play soccer with a dirty plastic bottle on the wet ground behind him.

The camp vanished overnight on Mar. 2.

“It’s wrong. They told us to leave in the middle of the night,” Pierre-Louis said. “Just staying here now is a resistance. If they ask me to leave, I’ll be forced out.”

Residents who formed the informal committee running the tent camp swept through at 11 p.m., according to witnesses, telling everyone they had to leave immediately.

Families were told that bulldozers would come onto the field early in the morning to demolish Villa Manrese. No demolition crew arrived and the villa is still standing.

“They told us the bulldozer was coming to intimidate us,” said Johnny Cherezard, a 23-year-old student. “The government said nobody has a right to push people out unless they have a place to go. We had people who were sick and injured.”

“The Father gave the signal to the committee to force people out,” he said. By 3 a.m., most people had left the camp.

Father Garraud is living in a neighbour’s gated home 40 yards away from the camp. In an extended interview next to the pool, he blamed the removal of the people from the area on the camp’s committee members.

“The committee was organising so badly. I told them one month in advance to prepare places because they’re going to have to move for the demolition,” he said. “They didn’t do anything.”

Garraud said he slept through the night and was surprised Wednesday morning to see the empty field. He claims the committee acted on its own.

Four of the committee members, sitting on the steps of a nearby building together, insist the priest told them that night to move everyone out because the villa would be leveled in the morning.

“The priest has to protect himself, that’s why he blames it on us,” said Damis Duviose, a heavy-set young man. “We lived in the camp too, now we’re just down the road. We didn’t make the decision, we can’t do anything without the priest saying so.”

Jane Elizabeth Avenell-Guardigli is a British woman living in the Dominican Republic. With some friends, she brought supplies over the border after the earthquake and wound up staying at the same house as Father Garraud.

“We were awoken in the night,” she said in an interview. “There was lots of screaming and people calling for Pѐre Garraud. He was up and listening, but he did not go to see them.”

“We stayed up all night listening to the screaming. They all had to go back to their streets, by the ruins of their homes,” Avenell-Guardigli said.

“There’s no way I can imagine justifying their actions,” she added.

At least one Canadian body, along with the body of a French national, still lie beneath the rubble. Haitians call the area around Villa Manrese “Impasse Canada” because so many Canadians came to stay there.

Five staff from the Canadian embassy came to the site to talk with Father Garraud. The embassy asked the Haitian construction company Vorbe Et Fils for an estimate on removing the body, but gave the contract to the state construction company CNE.

The priest said CNE told him several times last week they were coming to begin the operation, but they never came. The French embassy asked the Canadians to pull out the French body as well in the operation.

The camp committee members believe Father Garraud was pressured into moving ahead with demolition by construction companies and the Canadian embassy. Garraud denied being pressured by anyone.

The Canadian embassy did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.

Around a dozen men, women, and children still occupy the field.

Leonardo Delzor, 11, lost his aunt, uncle, and father in the earthquake. “I came to sleep here sometimes,” he said Saturday. “But last night when it was raining, I slept standing up. I had to hide my body in a little corner. ”

“I want somebody to help me, even if he only gave me a tarp, because I could spread it out to sleep on it,” he said. His blue shirt is smudged with brown mud.

“They moved people out that night, but I stayed here because I have nowhere to go,” Delzor said.

First photo by Jane Elizabeth Avenell-Guardigli, second from me. Before March 2, and after. The dirt is still lined with trenches, made by camp-dwellers to divert the rains.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 23, 2010 (IPS) – A cacophony of murmurs and cries echoed through the neighbourhoods of Haiti’s capital city Monday night as a violent aftershock shook people awake. Ten minutes later, another tremor rocked the ground, this time more smoothly back and forth.

The 4.7 magnitude tremors were a momentary distraction from pressing concerns over Haiti’s oncoming season of heavy rains, said to begin in March and last three months.

Shelter is now the top priority for relief groups, ahead of food and water distribution. They are rushing to supply thick plastic tarps, rather than tents, to over 500,000 internally displaced people in Port-Au-Prince – many still living under bedsheets tied over sticks in crowded settlements.

At a shelter distribution by CARE International at a camp in a Petionville public square, the tarps were received with a mixture of confusion and disappointment.

“It’s not clear for us. We can’t set them up because they don’t send anyone to give an explanation,” said Joseph Jean-Ones, whose family lives in the camp, as he tried to fit one metal pole on top of another.

His wife was given a gray tarp, a set of gleaming metal poles, and a single piece of paper with pictoral diagrams showing how to tie the materials together. The tarps do not come with text instructions, in Haitian Creole or any language.

“They should teach people how to set them up before distributing them,” said another man, setting the supplies down on the ground. “Now we don’t know what to do with it. It’s like they’re distributing problems to us.”

An aid worker with CARE International, who asked not to be identified by name, said non-Haitian staff with her organisation are not supposed to walk into any camps alone. Seeing this reporter walk in and out several times, she asked to tag along.

“Maybe we should have tried doing this ourselves first,” she said quietly, while attempting to show a confused family how to construct the tarp shelter.

At least 330,000 people throughout Port-Au-Prince have received tarps so far, according to the U.N.

The dark gray tarps are widely visible in camps throughout the city, tied at varying angles over wood and metal objects that make up the walls of makeshift shelters.

“No one is pretending that this offers anything but very partial protection from the rains,” Alex Wynter, spokesman for the International Federation of the Red Cross, told reporters in a press briefing.

“I would say that the tents and tarpaulins, in addition to giving people a modicum of privacy, give people a tool with which they can stay dry overnight,” he said. “But there’s no doubt that we face a very grave crisis here, when the rains come.”

Wynter said the peculiarities of Haiti’s climate make the rainy season “especially violent, even by tropical standards worldwide.”

There are also concerns over poor sanitation and the possibility of water-borne diseases spreading quickly in the camps. Haitians are being encouraged to dig shallow trenches for drainage.

Plastic tarps are far more prevalent than tents in the city’s camps. Large white domed tents, called Shelterboxes, from the UK-based charity of the same name, are scattered by the dozens in a few camps.

“What we’re about is shelter, warmth and dignity – it’s difficult to get that with tarps,” said John Leach, Shelterbox’s Head of Operations, in an interview. He said the plastic tarps will prove inadequate under heavy rains.

“If tarps are that great, why are all the U.N. people living in tents?” he asked.

NGOs working to provide shelter for the population are coordinating through a “shelter cluster” team based at a U.N. base.

Asked about the balance of tarps versus tents being distributed, Gregg McDonald, a lead member of the shelter cluster staff, said, “There are 142 agencies in the cluster that agree with this strategy [of tarp distribution], a couple of irresponsible agencies still doing tents.”

“Tents are inappropriate now. The extra floor space is not available,” he said. Tarps “can move, have a lot more versatility, strength, and are longer-lasting.”

Luckner Thervius, one of two dozen committee members organising the camp in Petionville, said he understood why tarps were necessary. “It would be better if everyone had a small one,” pointing to a rectangular green tent shared by several families. “That one is too big. There’s not enough space if everyone had one like this.”

CARE International contacted IPS after the tarp distribution to say that their staff would set up a tarp shelter as an example in each camp from now on.

Hi Al and friends,

Excellent reply. I thought the open letter and response would be linked from the Narco News homepage. Also, why isn’t it open to comments? Is anyone actually going to see it, just sitting there in the lab section of the site?

My reaction to the letter was the same as yours: would have considered signing had it not been for the last paragraph. Even then, the questions seem premised on a guilt-by-association mode of thought, so I don’t think I’d have signed. Maybe if they were worded differently.

But I respect the desire to ask questions of a think tank that is not very transparent, that emanated condescension and indifference at the school, that made a grave mistake in 2005 for which its President did not apologize. One of the positive things I can imagine coming out of this is for the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) to respond with some new, useful level of detail and coherence about who they are and what they do.

I’ve had friendly conversations with some of the TeleSur reporters you mentioned. I disagree with them strongly. They are convinced the ICNC is a malevolent organization, likely a front for the US government, and I haven’t seen the evidence for that yet. They can’t stomach having anything to do with the group. To me the ICNC appears more disorganized and clueless, when it comes to Latin America, than anything else.

People should judge us journalists principally on our body of work. The notion that merely going to a school in Mexico for ten days where the ICNC gave some presentations irreparably taints me, or casts lasting doubt on my journalistic independence is repulsive. It’s an insult to the intelligence of the school’s participants and grassroots organizations in various countries that have listened to the group’s spiel.

What you said about journalists’ willingness to be fired from their jobs is right-on. As I explained at the school, I’ve been approached by various corporate media since the earthquake in Haiti. I will use them to fund my work and reach wider audiences, with the expectation that I might choose to end the relationship or be fired at any moment because of their penchant for sensationalism, misinformation, and incompetence.

My integrity will never depend on a salary. I know that if I’m doing valuable work in today’s wired, increasingly diverse media economy, an audience will be there to support it. That’s why I came to Haiti, back when no one paid much attention to the place, full of hope and confidence.

One thing I agree with some critics on: it would have helped to invite and address all questions specifically about the ICNC’s role in the school in a prominent public form at the start – whether by blog post or in person. This was a brewing controversy already familiar to many involved with the school. I’m reminded of the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry’s 2004 run for US President, which his campaign ignored and thought other people would ignore. It was a mistake – even though the accusations had no basis in fact, they spread by various means and became a huge issue.

I wouldn’t have been distracted at times, wondering if a few long plenaries with Jim Lawson, Jack DuVall, et al. were a condition of the money, had it been crystal-clear that the ICNC’s participation in the school was strictly at your invitation from the beginning. And I have no doubts about that now.

I was hoping for more a little more hands-on journalism and civil resistance training from the school. The content of the ICNC’s lectures on non-violence didn’t strike me as groundbreaking (or manipulative) material. The dynamics of non-violent civil resistance are best understood in the midst of a movement, but an overview of its history and tactics can learned from books, films, and independent research.

The vital practice of authentic journalism cannot be learned this way. This is why the School for Authentic Journalism is so important, why it deserves the support of citizens and institutions the world over. I hope to return.

Those are my thoughts for today. I recorded audio of the multi-hour debate about the ICNC that took place on February 11 within the school. If anyone is interested in reviewing it, contact me by e-mail.

And now back to work. Hopefully no more aftershocks for a while!

Best,
Ansel

Update: Also big thanks to Valparaiso for adding Japanese captions to the YouTube video! Check out his Caracas Cafe blog for continuing independent coverage of Venezuela, Honduras, and Haiti (in Japanese).

Finally sorted out some video editing problems last night. Here’s a dispatch I completed a few days ago, focusing on an aid distribution near Cite Soleil last week. In Cite Soleil, Chanmas, Grand Goave, Tabarre, Leogane – almost everywhere I go – people are dismissive of UN peacekeepers and the Haitian government, while hopeful that US troops will help lead a robust aid and reconstruction effort. Many of them also ask for the return of ex-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was pushed out in a 2004 US-backed coup.

Will US troops live up to the hopes some quake survivors have placed in them? Only listening to Haitian voices over in the coming months will tell. I’m returning straight to Haiti after the School of Authentic Journalism in Mexico next week and plan on being here long after most journalists have left.

Many thanks to Chantal of The Haitian Blogger for help with translations. Some of it I did myself, so if any Creole-speaking readers spot errors please alert me.

Below, a quick video shot Tuesday of Canadian soldiers in the heart of Cite Soleil, showing how NOT to do aid distribution. I saw much worse later that day. More video on the way, as long my computer works.

GRAND GOAVE, Jan 28, 2010 (IPS) – Two gray 23-million-dollar hovercrafts sitting in the middle of a sandy tropical beach look like they are from another world. A pair of 15-foot-wide propeller fans sticks out from the back of each behemoth.

Along the narrow dirt road to this seaside town’s centre, families live under blankets stretched over sticks.

A tent city occupies the town’s main square, surrounded by crumbling buildings. Joseph Jean-Pierre Salam, the mayor of Grand Goave, about 15 kilometres west of Port-au-Prince, estimated that some 70 percent of the city’s important structures fell during the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on Jan. 12.

“They have made many promises, but we don’t see the action yet,” Salam said, referring to the international community. “We have a lot of people suffering. There is an expectation that help will come.”

Little food and water has been distributed by the dozens U.S. troops milling about the beach since the earthquake, according to local leaders.

“I went there to talk to them,” said Jean-Jacob Renee, an English teacher. “They said they are there to set up some tents for themselves, but they did not come with food or water – anything for the people.”

He said the only aid the military brought to Grand Goave was distributed by Catholic Relief Services, an international NGO. “When they are in the town, we don’t know. We don’t have their phone number,” he said. “Nobody has helped us.”

U.S. military personnel on the beach were busy unloading construction material and heavy equipment from cargo boats. Senior Chief Petty Officer Steve Krutky told IPS his disaster recovery team cleared a rockslide out of the road and worked to repair local orphanages run by evangelical missions.

The U.S. military did not respond to IPS requests for further clarification of the Navy’s role in Grand Goave.

An analysis by the Associated Press on Wednesday found that 33 cents of every dollar towards emergency aid in Haiti goes to military aid, more than three times the nine cents spent on food.

Residents of Grand Goave said there is a network of seven neighbourhood leaders for each section of the city that has not been tapped in the relief effort. Friends are pooling resources to purchase rice when possible, but family after family living outside the rubble of their homes told IPS they have received no assistance.

The roof of Rinvil Jean Weldy’s modest one-story brick house is broken off, resting at an angle on top of a kitchen table covered in dust. The rear wall crumbled, spilling onto the cracked ground. His wife remains at a nearby hospital nursing an injury from the quake.

“We need a tent, we need food and water, all the normal things,” Weldy said, pointing at his sons, who were hammering together scraps of wood to build the frame of a tent. “To the U.N., I say, I need help now.”

Weldy has been expecting compensation from the U.N. since Nov. 10, when he and numerous witnesses say part of a bullet fired by U.N. peacekeeping troops hit his shoulder. Four days before the earthquake, the U.N. said an internal investigation into the incident cleared the soldiers of any wrongdoing.

Witnesses told IPS the troops fired into the ground in an attempt to control a curious crowd, not into the air, as the U.N. maintains.

The U.N. peacekeepers are roundly dismissed by many Haitians as a source for relief in the country. “We have been living with the U.N. for many years, but now we see them very little,” Mayor Salam said matter-of-factly.

In Leogane, on the route back from Grand Goave to Port-Au-Prince, 500 families from a tent city in a field lined up in an orderly queue to receive food packages, in contrast to chaotic aid dispersals seen in Port-Au-Prince. Individuals walked into a clearing to grab a box each time a young Haitian man called out numbers through a megaphone.

“For us, it was very important to do this without military,” said Dolores Rescheleit, an aid worker with a German NGO called Arche Nova that provided the food. “Because the people in the camp are very strong. When you give the responsibility to the people in the camp, they will do it better than we will with the military.”

A committee of Haitians, with sub-committees to handle security, hygiene, and aid distribution, is governing the camp without problems, Rescheleit said. Women smiled as they walked back to their tents, balancing boxes of food on their heads.

I spoke to the New York Times Lede blog yesterday about what I’ve seen in Haiti over the past few days – chaotic food distributions, pros and cons of the US military’s presence, and the politics surrounding the question of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s return. I’m disappointed that their writers went for the most sensational angle and highlighted the first subject, leaving the others in separate, less prominent audio embeds.

I have footage of Grand Goave, Cite Soleil and so much more, to share too – if I can sort some technical issues out. Point me towards specific instructions on a reliable way to export videos from Final Cut Pro into a format suitable for viewing on YouTube and the web if you know where I can find them.

Jerry called me a few days after the quake, huddled with hundreds of people in a space without food and water. I was lining up a profile story with him before the catastrophe. But he’s already back at work, it appears. See some of his pre-disaster work here. He even tackled the problem of Haiti’s deforestation with his art, in an amusing way.

Here’s my story for yesterday’s Free Speech Radio News newscast, about Haitian radio broadcasters doing their best to stay on the air in the quake’s aftermath without any outside support. MP3. Video later.

Kudos to the BBC for making its broadcasts available in Creole for free. Didn’t get a chance to check out Signal FM, but the Committee to Protect Journalists has an interesting account of how they stayed on the air during the quake. MediaShift reports that only 10 out of 50 Port-Au-Prince radio stations are currently broadcasting.

A text version of this story was printed by Inter-Press Service.

Here’s my story for yesterday’s Free Speech Radio News newscast. Some horrific sights at both Cannape-Vert Hospital and the Doctors Without Borders Clinic in Cite Soleil.

MP3. Video probably coming later. It’s really an inefficient medium, from what I see here. Journalists go out, shoot footage, then come back mid-day to begin an hours-long editing process, when they could be out reporting. By tradition they go to the trouble of hiding cuts in interviews with b-roll, instead of doing simple, honest jump-cuts to which the YouTube generation is totally accustomed. There’s no innovation…

Update: Big thanks to the Quixotess in Seattle for transcribing! Global media collaboration FTW. Text below the jump.

We go now to Port-au-Prince, where medical workers are racing to treat patients. FSRN’s Ansel Herz reports.

[We can hear a man's low voice and a girl's voice raised. Throughout, we can hear people's voices in the background--a baby cooing, adults rushing about.]

Cracks run down the wall of Port-au-Prince’s central Cannape Vert hospital. Rooms and hallways are empty. There’s so little staff that for fleeting moments, even the main operating room, directly beneath a fractured skylight, looks abandoned. Then, two Haitian Red Cross volunteers rush in with another wounded person. Doctors run back in from all directions to begin their work again and again.

Florence Burreynau is a Haitian doctor who returned here from Canada just last year. She said she had difficulties setting up a practice there and wanted to live in her home country. Friends and family said she was crazy to go back. Her downtown clinic is unusable, so she came here, one of just three Haitian doctors seen at the hospital. They are helped by a team of ten French doctors who arrived here two days after the earthquake.

“I am trying my best to do some suture, giving some pills to the patient, trying to have the wounds clean.”

The doctors don’t have the materials to do much beyond treating skin wounds, of which there are many, to the head, feet, arms, and other body parts hit by falling houses. Doctors from the French team said medical supplies they were promised had not arrived yet, and they said that the French embassy had demanded that they close the interior of the hospital and return the embassy, a fifteen minute drive away, each day at 5 PM because of security concerns.

Outside the hospital, a 28 year old Haitian who asked only to be called Dr Samedi, does much of the same work, but he’s surrounded by wounded in tents, not the walls of the cramped hallway.

[We can hear a woman's voice, perhaps tense with pain. Once, she takes a ragged breath.]

He tries to soothe a woman as he pulls skin off of her gaping foot wound. “I know it hurts, girl, I know it’s bad,” he says.

Meanwhile, in Cite Soleil, the Doctors Without Borders clinic has enough supplies, but cannot use their building. They operate on three or four people at a time, while hundreds wait in tents for treatment. Many were carried in by Haitians who rescued them, and some have been waiting for more than a day. Samuel Jeanius is a 33 year old medical student.

“I want to tell the international community that we need help. Because a lot of people are suffering. We also need places for people to stay, because we are not safe here. This morning there was an aftershock, and there was panic. People ran away. I wish people would consider our need for medicine and surgeons, because we’re really trying to help people suffering.”

The doctors don’t rest for a moment, treating person after person for hours.

Later, American rescue worker Douglas Cobb arrives at the UN base with a pickup truck and several Haitian women in the back. Cobb said he was a 9/11 first responder, who tried to fly in medicine with the Peruvian military.

“Well, what really happened here, is the UN military were there. And then the US military came in and kicked them out. So they never allowed for any transition. So what they did was they just sent all the planes back, with the medicines and everything. And, right now, we’ve been driving with four people that we have rescued–including a pregnant woman, okay–who have injuries that medicine will stop them from dying, and we’ve been driving around for four hours to all these hospitals, and none of them have the medicines that we need to save their life. Because the US military turned their plane back.”

“Back to where? Where’d it go?

“Went to Santa Domingo. So then in Santa Domingo, we got a bus, and we came in with just everything we could fit in the bus. But we got a whole freakin’ planeful of the friggin’ medicine!”

Nearly a week after the earthquake, the US government says 265 medical personnel are on the ground in Haiti, while more than ten thousand armed soldiers guard the airport and embassy, and begin to distribute aid.

But at City Med Hospital down in Delmas, eight Haitian doctors struggling to maintain a maternity ward in an intact hospital said they’ve received zero assistance since the earthquake. They yelled at this reporter to go away, saying a CNN crew had already stopped by. “We need medicines and help, not journalists,” they said.

Ansel Herz, FSRN, Port-au-Prince.

I just checked the front page of CNN. The lead reads:

In the shadow of Haiti’s wrecked presidential palace lie the new homes of the capital’s 500,000 displaced residents. But with 4,000 convicted criminals on the loose, nothing and no one is safe.

They started pushing the violence meme the day after the earthquake. I was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer that evening via Skype. Part way through the interview, they cut to their correspondent for a live chat from the airport.

He spoke briefly with Mario Andreso, the chief of Haiti’s national police, who warned of out-of-control violence from all the prisoners who escaped the penitentiary the day of the quake. The CNN reporter repeated the claims uncritically.

When they came back to me, I began to explain that I had walked through the remains of the jail (here’s the video). That many of the prisoners were reportedly shot dead by police as they tried to escape. And that I had not seen or heard of violence so far.

The prison was a hellish place, with almost no medical facilities. Did it contain some genuine thugs? Yes. But it also contained many political prisoners and people who never received a fair trial from Haiti’s flawed courts. These are simple facts that CNN is too happy to overlook. I was quickly interrupted by Blitzer and they went to commercial break.

Haitians on the streets are not worried about the jail. Food, water, fuel, medicine, and shelter is all I hear. I received five calls yesterday from friends with 200 children here, 300 people there huddled in schools, with nothing to live on. I sent the info on to a few contacts in the aid community.

The linked CNN article describes no violence from eye-witnesses. It quotes the police chief again, warning of possible rape and murder in the tent camps.

To date, since arriving in Haiti in September – including the earthquake’s aftermath – I have not seen a single incidence of violence. The tent camps through the city, whether in Chanmas or near Delmas, are destitute but totally peaceful.

US Ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Merten said that while security is a concern he knows of very little ongoing violence, in an interview last night with PBS that I helped arrange. “I think people should be aware that the vast majority of Haitians here are behaving in a calm and peaceful manner.”

The images collected here show what look like scuffles. I’ve seen a few Haitian scuffles – they are not brawls, not like the vicious punches thrown by drunkards every night in the streets of Austin, Texas, my hometown. It’s shoving and grabbing what you can. You’d do the same if you were hungry.

As I ride around the city on a motorbike taxi, camera in hand, everyone is helpful. I exchanged $250 USD on the streets without incident. No Haitian I’ve spoken with has witnessed violence themselves. It may be happening but it is not widespread.

One picture shows a man killed by the National Police, not by an ordinary Haitian. What the captions describe as looting looks to me like the retrieval of life-saving resources going unused.

Tell CNN, the BBC, and other media to stop being alarmist fear-mongers. They are not reporting facts. They are not authentic journalists. They are not with the Haitian people.

Update 1/21: The few times I have checked the CNN front page since then, I have not seen articles hyping security fears. Liza McAlister, a professor at Wesleyan University who is writing essays about Haiti for CNN, said she forwarded this post to her editor. Maybe it had an effect. Thanks to everyone spreading the word, keep it up.

This dispatch begins at 10pm the night of the Tuesday’s earthquake, and resumes the following morning after I caught some sleep in an open bus abandoned in a downtown Port-Au-Prince street.  More to come.

Update: Here is a written piece published at Inter-Press News Service. Video of Moliere’s burial coming later.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 17, 2010 (IPS) – Millions of dollars in aid are pouring into Haiti. Another head of state visits each day. The misery in Port-Au-Prince dominates the news nearly a week after the 7.0 earthquake struck the heart of this island country.

What has changed on the streets of Haiti’s capital city since the tremors? The Haitian people have mobilised, while foreign aid efforts continue to stall.

More tents have been erected in the roads where Haitians gathered, away from crumbling structures. In the public squares across from the collapsed national palace Saturday, a young couple explained that the yellow tent overhead was given to them by a wealthy Haitian.

That area, called Chanmas, seems an ideal place to distribute aid to the thousands of people sitting and sharing food and shelter in orderly fashion. But people said no aid workers had stopped by to give them anything the whole day.

Two U.S. Navy helicopters flew overhead in opposite directions while they talked with this reporter. Earlier in the day, hundreds of U.S. soldiers could be seen walking back and forth inside the airport.

As of Sunday, the United Nations reported that humanitarian relief is still being bottlenecked at the main airport and roads remain blocked with debris. Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) said that one of its planes carrying essential medical supplies was not permitted to land at the airport.

“Despite guarantees, given by the United Nations and the US Defense Department, an MSF cargo plane carrying an inflatable surgical hospital was blocked from landing in Port-au-Prince on Saturday, and was re-routed to Samana, in Dominican Republic,” the group said in a statement Sunday. “All material from the cargo is now being sent by truck from Samana, but this has added a 24-hour delay for the arrival of the hospital.”

The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, is also working with Haitian authorities to set up a land corridor to bring in relief from the Dominican town of Barahona 130 kilometres away.

With the dead still being counted, and thousands missing, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has said that 100,000 deaths “would seem a minimum”. The country’s interior minister reported that some 50,000 bodies have already been recovered.

European Union ministers called an emergency meeting for Monday to determine the costs of the massive reconstruction that will needed in coming months. The United Nations has already issued an appeal for 562 million to aid Haiti – even before the earthquake, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere.

The 562 million would target the estimated three million Haitians affected for a period of six months, with half of the funds being earmarked for emergency food aid, and the rest for health, water, sanitation, nutrition, early recovery, emergency education and other key needs.

But in many parts of the devastated capital, there was little evidence of outside assistance.

In the suburb of Santo, dozens of Haitian men organised a digging and rescue operation on a pile of rubble. A huge orange Caterpillar bulldozer sat nearby, stationary. Heavy equipment from the Haitian construction company CNE is all over the city.

At the collapsed parliament building in downtown Port-Au-Prince, a bulldozer retrieved the bodies of politicians lying in the street.

Supporters of Haiti’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, dragged the stiff and dripping body of a high-profile party organiser named Bob Moliere into a wheelbarrow. They followed the bulldozer 200 yards to a grassy area by the sea and dumped his body into a four-foot-deep grave they had dug minutes earlier.

Marianne Moliere, now a widow, looked out at the dipping sun with tears streaming down her face. “There is no life for me because Bob was everything to me. I lost everything. Everything is destroyed,” she said.

“I’m sleeping in the street now because I’m homeless. But when I get some water, I share with others. Or if someone gives some spaghetti, I share with my family and others.”

She clutched a manila folder with photos of her dead husband. One of them showed him shaking hands with former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The men had no idea that Aristide, pushed out by a coup in 2004, had issued a statement from exile in South Africa asking that he be allowed to return to Haiti immediately.

Told the news, they started smiling and talking excitedly with one another.

Moliere won his freedom from the post-coup regime in Haiti only three years ago after a full year in detention. The nearby grave remained open for the moment, a small mound of loose brown soil waiting to cover up Moliere’s stiff right arm pointing at the sky.