Haiti: “In the Hands of God Now”
by Associated Press
Article and headline that was banner headline news in the Salt Lake Tribune, Monday, January 18, 2010
Port-Au-Prince, Haiti » Prayers of thanksgiving and cries for help rose from Haiti’s huddled homeless Sunday, the sixth day of an epic humanitarian crisis that was straining the world’s ability to respond and igniting flare-ups of violence amid the rubble of Port-au-Prince.
Haitian police struggled to scatter hundreds of stone-throwing looters in the city’s Vieux Marche, or Old Market. Elsewhere downtown, amid the smoke from bonfires burning uncollected bodies, gunfire rang out and bands of machete-wielding young men roamed the streets, faces hidden by bandanas.
A leading aid group complained of skewed priorities and a supply bottleneck at the U.S.-controlled airport. The general in charge said the U.S. military was “working aggressively” to speed up deliveries.
Beside the ruins of the Port-Au-Prince cathedral, where the sun streamed through the shattered stained glass, the priest told his flock at their first Sunday Mass since Tuesday’s earthquake, “We are in the hands of God now.”
In the midst of one of the world’s worst natural disasters there are still believers in a God who cares about us! How can that be? How is the human mind so nimble
as to find God in the rubble? Many of those who survived are saying, “thanks be to God that I am still alive.’ They can’t help but look around and see the thousands upon thousands of dead bodies and the tons of rubble and yet, somehow think that God saved the ones who lived, which conversely means that God deliberately didn’t want the others to live.
What is it with this religion stuff that shuts the brain down?
Help me! Please help me! How does God fit into this earthquake? There will be lots of miracles attributed to God, but somehow God was not involved in the cause of the earthquake. Does he just arrive after disaster? Is that the modus operandi of a just God—-a Hero to the rescue! With all this power, how about exercising it before the fact rather than after the fact?
Churches are actually praying for and soliciting contributions to help alleviate the suffering and misery of this natural disaster that they believe God could prevent, and thus could cause, and that our prayers will somehow be heard by God and make him want to repent of this minor oversight of His. Was He asleep at the switch? Did He have too many things to do? Too many prayers to answer? Where was He when this came down?
Is it that He just wants to see how we will react under pressure? Like kids burning grasshoppers! Is it kind of a worldly test for which there will be a great reward for those who don’t scream and yell or blame Him?
But anger mounted hourly that other helping hands were slow in getting food and water to millions in need.
“The government is a joke. The U.N. is a joke,” Jacqueline Thermiti, 71, said as she lay in the dust with dozens of dying elderly outside their destroyed nursing home. “We’re a kilometer (half a mile) from the airport and we’re going to die of hunger.”
Water was delivered to more people around the capital, where an estimated 300,000 displaced were living outdoors. But food and medicine were still scarce.
The crippled city choked on the stench of death and shook with yet another aftershock Sunday. On the streets, people were still dying, people were on their knees praying for help, pregnant women were giving birth on the pavement, and the injured were showing up in wheelbarrows and on people’s backs at hurriedly erected field hospitals. Authorities warned that looting and violence could spread.
“This is one of the most serious crises in decades,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said as he flew into the Haitian capital. “The damage, destruction and loss of life are just overwhelming.”
A reliable death toll may be weeks away, but the Pan American Health Organization estimates 50,000 to 100,000 died in the 7.0-magnitude tremor, and Haitian officials believe the number is higher.
Celebrating Mass outside the once-proud pink-and-white cathedral, now a shell of rubble where a rotting body lay in the entrance, the Rev. Eric Toussaint preached of thanksgiving to a small congregation of old women and other haggard survivors assembled under the open sky.
“Why give thanks to God? Because we are here,” Toussaint said. “What happened is the will of God. We are in the hands of God now.”
Mondesir Raymone, a 27-year-old single mother of two, was grateful. “We have survived by the grace of God,” she said.
But others were angry.
“It’s a catastrophe and it is God who has put this upon us,” said Jean-Andre Noel, 39, a computer technician. “Those who live in Haiti need everything. We need food, we need drink, we need medicine. We need help.”
Were his parishioners being helped? Toussaint was asked. “Not yet,” he replied.
The U.N. World Food Program was “pretty well on target to reach more than 60,000 people today,” up from 40,000 the previous day, WFP spokesman David Orr said. But U.N. officials said they must raise that to 2 million within a month. The U.S. aid chief, Rajiv Shah, told “Fox News Sunday” he believed the U.S. distributed 130,000 “meals ready to eat” on Saturday, but the need was much larger. “We’re really trying to address it,” he said.
Some food was still commercially available in the city, but prices had skyrocketed beyond what most people could afford.
In a further sign of the delays, the aid group CARE had yet to set a plan for distributing 38 tons of WFP high-energy biscuits in outlying areas of Haiti, CARE spokesman Brian Feagans said Sunday. He did not say why.
The Geneva-based aid group Doctors Without Borders put it bluntly: “There is little sign of significant aid distribution.”
The “major difficulty,” it said, was the bottleneck at the airport, under U.S. military control. It said a flight carrying its own inflatable hospital was denied landing clearance and was being trucked overland from Santo Domingo, almost 200 miles away in the Dominican Republic, delaying its arrival by 24 hours.
French, Brazilian and other officials had earlier complained about the U.S.-run airport’s refusal to allow their supply planes to land. A World Food Program official told The New York Times that the Americans’ priorities were out of sync, allowing too many U.S. military flights and too few aid deliveries.
Angry survivors loitered amid piles of burning garbage in the Bel-Air slum. “White guys, get the hell out!” they shouted in apparent frustration at the sight of more and more foreigners in their streets who were not delivering help.
Work went on, meanwhile, perhaps in its desperate final hours, to find survivors buried in the vast rubble of Port-au-Prince.
More than 1,700 rescue workers had saved more than 70 lives since the quake, a U.N. spokeswoman said in Geneva.
More on the earthquake in Haiti
Benefit » Actor George Clooney and Haitian-born singer Wyclef Jean will host a Jan. 22 benefit for victims of the earthquake in Haiti. The benefit will include performances from Bono, Sting, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Alicia Keys.
U.S. prepares for immigrants » U.S. officials are stepping up measures to prevent last week’s earthquake in Haiti from triggering a Caribbean migration not seen in two nearly two decades. Experts see no signs for now of a seaborne exodus, although history shows that such events are difficult to predict. That said, South Florida counties have readied contingency plans, immigration authorities have cleared space in a 600-bed detention center in Miami, and Obama administration officials have begun discouraging Haitians from attempting the hazardous 600-mile sea crossing to Florida.
Source »The Associated Press
Elderly abandoned
Nursing home residents barely a mile from the center of aid distribution are dying waiting for food and water. › A7
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
So, I hit submit before I was really finished. I agree with your comments 100%. It’s going to take so much time, money and energy and even then, nothing will be the same for the survivors. I don’t believe anybody would do that to anybody, especially a God.