Haitians receive little help despite promises - Mail & Guardian Online: The smart news source
World leaders pledged massive aid programmes to rebuild Haiti but desperate earthquake survivors were still waiting on Sunday for food, water and medicine.
View the Mail & Guardian Online's photo gallery.
Five days after a 7.0 magnitude quake killed up to 200 000 people, international rescue teams clawed away at the rubble of collapsed buildings in the wrecked capital, Port-au-Prince, in a race against time to find more survivors.
But logistical logjams kept major relief from reaching the hundreds of thousands of hungry Haitians waiting for help, many of them sheltering in makeshift camps on streets strewn with debris and decomposing bodies.
"I'm going there with a very heavy heart. This is one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades. The damage, destruction, loss of life is just overwhelming," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said as he boarded a flight for Haiti on Sunday.
The United Nations was feeding 40 000 people a day and hoped to increase that to one million within two weeks, he said. "The challenge at this time is how to coordinate all of this outpouring of assistance." ...
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment