Aid pours into Haiti, but delivery is difficult

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI -- The search for water and food grew increasingly desperate Saturday for millions of Haitians, with some of the most battered neighborhoods still awaiting even the most basic goods from the international aid effort.

Four days after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake throttled this capital, there was little evidence on the streets that help had arrived. Looting intensified in some neighborhoods, unsecured by Haitian authorities or foreign troops.

The price of what few staples remain in the city soared, fuel supplies dwindled, and thousands of Haitians abandoned listing homes for squalid tent cities springing up in even the smallest public spaces. Public parks and tennis courts filled with families carrying what possessions they had left.

"We're just going to the stadium to see what happens," said Lenz Bouchette, 22, as he and his neighbors passed down suitcases and household items stuffed in plastic laundry baskets from a cracked second-story apartment above a beauty salon. "There is nothing here."

Thousands of Haitians could be seen doing the same, streaming through streets with suitcases and children.

Bouchette was among hundreds who strung tarps and laid out blankets on the artificial turf of the national soccer stadium, hoping it would be among the places that aid agencies and the nearly absent Haitian government begin passing out the arriving aid.

The capital, where as many of a third of Haiti's 9 million people live, appeared frozen in the grim aftermath of the earthquake, the largest to strike this ill-equipped nation in more than 200 years.

Bodies remained on major streets, far less crowded than usual due to a lack of fuel. Haitians by the thousands have been spending nights in the streets. Many roads have been blocked off with tires, piles of trash, and plentiful rubble, complicating efforts by rescue crews, engineers and aid workers to get around.

The stench of decomposition thickened around the scores of crumpled cinder-block buildings around the capital where thousands of bodies likely remain trapped.

In the main city cemetery, whose exterior wall has been tumbled down in one place to make way for a large hole, more than a dozen bodies remained in an open-air grave visible from the adjacent street. Bodies also rotted along the narrow lanes that wind among the cemetery's raised pastel-painted tombs.

Rescue efforts, from those performed by international crews to the desperation improvisations of family members and neighbors, focused on the fading prospect of saving buried survivors. But public health concerns mounted, among aid officials and Haitians themselves, over the abundance of corpses and the diseases they may soon carry.

But for many Haitians the focus shifted from the dead to the living, and how to make ends meet in a city rapidly running out of what few resources existed before the quake.