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from Photographers Blog:
Scenes from Haiti
The numbers from Haiti are staggering. Authorities say the death toll is likely to be between 100,000 and 200,000. Already, 75,000 bodies have been buried in mass graves. 1.5 million residents are homeless . Families have been torn apart. Neighborhoods have been flattened. The government has nearly ceased to exist. But numbers can tell only a small part of the story. Scenes of the devastation in Haiti are filling airwaves and newspapers around the world, triggering a flood of compassion and donations.
An injured child receives medical treatment in Port-au-Prince, January 13, 2010. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
Residents walk next to a dead body in Port-au-Prince, January 13, 2010. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
from Global News Journal:
Haiti’s plea: “We need help”
-This is a guest post from Rigoberto Giron, who is heading up CARE’s emergency response efforts in Haiti from CARE HQ in Atlanta. Any opinions expressed are his own.-
Just outside of CARE's offices in Pétionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, hundreds of newly homeless people are camped out in a public square. During the day, they wait patiently in the scorching sun. But at night, when hunger and thirst overtake them, groups of people can be heard clapping and chanting. Daybreak reveals new banners that read, in English and Creole, "We need help!"
from Tales from the Trail:
The complicated question of Haiti’s orphans
The devastation caused by Haiti's earthquake has extended to some of its youngest and most powerless victims: orphans awaiting clearance to join adoptive families in the United States.
The U.S. government has already said it will allow orphaned children from Haiti to come to the United States temporarily for needed medical treatment, and on Wednesday expanded its effort.
from Global News Journal:
United Nations confronts life and death in Haiti
MINUSTAH's collapsed headquarters in Port-au-Prince.
Everybody who knew French Canadian U.N. staffer Alexandra Duguay loved her. She was attractive, energetic and extremely intelligent. I got to know her well when she worked behind the media counter at U.N. headquarters. She was always eager to make sure we reporters had the latest resolutions, U.N. reports and speeches. And in the evening she enjoyed a glass of wine or beer at the Delegates Lounge. But she was bored with her job and wanted more adventure. One morning last spring she had an unusual twinkle in her eye. I asked her if something was up and she said yes. "I'm going to Haiti." A few months later she had her going-away party at the U.N. Correspondents Association room. She and her boyfriend prepared for their imminent deployment to Haiti, where Alex was to be a spokeswoman and media coordinator for U.N. operations in the Western hemisphere's poorest nation.
Alex quickly settled into her exciting new job. Late last year she emailed me an update of life in Port-au-Prince: "Even though it's a bit of a s****y place, I can't complain. I just spend too much time between my house and my hotel room, a.k.a. office. Yeah, we have peacocks as pets ... Haitians are nuts. Lovely but nuts."
from Funds Hub:
Morning line-up
News and views on the hedge fund sector from Reuters and elsewhere:
Asian hedge funds global outperformers in 2009 - WSJ
Hedge funds withdrawal restrictions hold investors hostage - Bloomberg
Cayman earthquake rattles hedge funds nerves - Washington Post
Former hedge fund manager aids insider trading investigation - New York Times
from Tales from the Trail:
Haiti’s “Wizard-of-Oz” president – nowhere to be seen
There's something weirdly symbolic in the sight of thousands of homeless Haitians massed in a sprawling tent city bang in front of the collapsed icing-sugar white presidential palace.
They're here because it's the biggest open space in the capital, but it somehow looks like an appeal for President Rene Preval to come out and speak to his people and reassure them that he stands behind them, that together the country will get through the catastrophe caused by Tuesday's earthquake.
Four days after Tuesday's earthquake the Haitian flag that once fluttered above the National Palace still lies in a wilted heap over the toppled white ruin. In the park opposite, men and women strip to their underpants to bathe in a large fountain and scrub their clothes. The hang their laundry on the park rails.
Garbage is scattered everywhere and the smell of urine and excrement is getting worse.
Far from coming to address them, Preval is holed up in the judicial police headquarters near the airport, mumbling that he can't do much when half the government's offices are destroyed and he doesn't even have a cell phone signal.
Meanwhile, the hundreds of thousands of Haitians who lost their homes and families have been left to fend for themselves, with no food handouts and no proper medical treatment. In many cases, they are seriously injured.
Foreign rescue workers are battling round the clock digging for survivors. But in the absence of a working government, the disaster relief teams who are supposed to be delivering food, latrines and medical supplies are still mostly dithering about sorting out logistics.
From the shambles outside the presidential palace, you wonder if anybody is in charge at all.
"The country is not working right now. It's not even eating," remarked Louis Widlyne, one of the countless people sleeping on a sheet that marks out his living quarters in the park.
A police officer called Joe was more sympathetic. He had received no orders since Tuesday's disaster, but decided on his own on Saturday that it was time to go back on the beat.
"Preval should have come and spoken to his people, but he hasn't," he said. "He is like that. It's just the kind of president he is."
Click here for more coverage of the Haiti earthquake.
from Tales from the Trail:
Haiti’s forgotten bodies
As a ragtag group of Haitian rescue workers tried to dig a dead man from underneath a collapsed telecoms company building in Port-au-Prince this week, the firm's owner told me how the 40-year-old security guard had been a cherished employee.
Only a short time before, Tarek el Bakri, a Lebanese businessman who lived at the top of the now perilously slanted building, had paid for the funeral of the man's grandson, so much was he part of the family. Now he was paying workers to free his corpse.
The workers yelled and squabbled about how best to get at him -- only his arm, shoulder and head were visible -- without causing the structure, which had desks sandwiched between its layers, and a car crushed underneath, to collapse further.
A water mains had burst, causing a small fountain to spray out near the dead man's head. At one point an excavator churned toward the site, but the workers waved it away.
The man had three children, el Bakri told me. He was crushed along with two cleaning staff. In all, Bakri lost 11 employees in offices across the city, as well as his own home.
He said he was the only one pushing for the bodies to be pulled out. He hadn't heard anything from city officials about what he should do. "In any other country people would gather together to help each other," he said. "Here you are on your own. Nobody cares."
When I returned a day later, the man's corpse was still there. His dark skin dustier than before. The fountain was still spurting.
I remembered then what el Bakri had told me: looters squeezed in to steal all the office computers and cell phone stocks well before anybody had tried to free the victims.
Reuters photos by Eduardo Munoz and Carlos Barria.
Click here for more stories on the Haiti earthquake disaster.
from Tales from the Trail:
Haiti – shutting out the cries
Last night, I slept on the floor with the cries of the wounded searing through the night air across the hills of Port-au-Prince. Every so often, there was an outbreak of wailing and shrieking, when someone died. Sometimes, prayers were sung and chanted. We are all becoming inured to the pain - I found myself longing for earplugs.
At 5 a.m. in the morning, there was an after-shock from the earthquake, one of the strongest yet. The ground shook, sending more rubble falling off the half-destroyed Hotel Villa Creole, waking up dozens of exhausted journalists, and causing more pain to the many wounded and homeless Haitians sleeping on the street outside the hotel. The few waiters still working here served us coffee, while volunteers at the impromptu hospital on our porch tried to close gashes and keep people alive.
By midday, I had visited a dozen makeshift refugee camps where no one had received a drop of water or a bite to eat from authorities or aid agencies. I found nine mass graves outside the capital, the putrid smell of piled up corpses still hanging on my T-shirt. I saw chaos at the airport where Haitians are clamoring to get out, and the world is clamoring to get aid in.
Now, after grilled chicken at the hotel (where does it keep coming from?) it is time to step over the bodies on the porch again to go and check reports of rioting downtown and burning bodies in a nearby refugee settlement. Then, it will be back to the Villa Creole to see if the water is back on for a shower in the room I share with about a dozen colleagues. Despite the large comfortable bed, no one dares sleep there because of the after-shocks. But until the water went off, it was worth the risk for a few minutes to shower and get clean.
Yesterday, the wine and beer flowed for some during dinner, though conversation was interrupted by chilling groans from over the wall. Don't take any of that flippantly -- it is most certainly not written that way. After nearly two decades covering the trouble-spots of Latin America, Africa and elsewhere, this correspondent and most of the multitude of veteran colleagues here still find the surreal juxtapositions deeply disturbing. Everyone reacts in their own way -- some stop to help, others walk on by. But nobody is sleeping soundly, believe me.
from FaithWorld:
Port-au-Prince RC cathedral in ruins after Haiti earthquake
Our photographers in Haiti have produced many sad images of the widespread death and destruction from Tuesday's massive earthquake, some of which are collected in a slideshow here. Following are shots of the Roman Catholic cathedral in Port-au-Prince in ruins. Among the dead in the quake was Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot, who the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano reported was found lifeless "under the rubble of the archbishop's residence."
(Credits: Kena Betancur, Kena Betancur, Jorge Silva, Eduardo Munoz, Reuters TV)
from Tales from the Trail:
Clinton says Haiti’s development prospects can still be good
Former President Bill Clinton, who is helping to coordinate global relief for Haiti with former President George W. Bush, 
says the quake-stricken country could bounce back much more quickly than people might think.
Clinton told NBC's Today show that Haiti had made it onto the path to modernization when the earthquake struck on Tuesday. But he denied claims that the devastation may have set the impoverished country's development back by half a century.
