Haitians praise God after apocalyptic quake

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Drumbeats called the faithful to a Sunday Mass praising God amid a scene resembling the Apocalypse — a collapsed cathedral in a city cloaked with the smell of death and rattled by gunfire, where rescue crews battle to pry an ever-smaller number of the living from the ruins.

Sunlight streamed through what little was left of blown-out stained-glass windows as the Rev. Eric Toussaint preached to a small crowd of survivors. A rotting body lay in its main entrance.

“Why give thanks to God? Because we are here,” Toussaint said. “We say ‘Thank you God.’ What happened is the will of God. We are in the hands of God now.”

As Catholic and Protestant worshippers across the city met for their first Sunday services since the magnitude-7.0 quake, many Haitians were still waiting for food and water after five days and violence began to crack through.

RELATED STORIES:
• Clinton pledges close cooperation with Haitians
• Bush, Clinton: Haiti response not political
• Official: Violence in Haiti hinders aid work
• Body of top U.N. envoy in Haiti found
• Haiti quake survivors get more food, water
• How to donate to the Haiti relief effort

Gunfire crackled in the streets as police battled suspected looters in parts of the city. Officers were seen hurling tear gas canisters, sending crowds running along the rubble-strewn avenues. At least some suspected looters were beaten and shot.

Haitians seemed increasingly frustrated by a seemingly invisible government — some setting bonfires in a downtown street to burn the bodies authorities have been unable to remove, leaving passers-by to cover their faces against the smell of burning flesh.

Rescue workers, too, were exasperated by the struggle to get aid through the small, damaged and clogged airport run by U.S. military controllers, and to get it from the airport into town.

Doctors Without Borders said Sunday that a cargo plane carrying a field hospital was denied permission to land at the airport and had to be rerouted through the Dominican Republic — creating a 24-hour delay in setting up a crucial field hospital.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called the quake “one of the most serious crises in decades.”

“The damage, destruction and loss of life are just overwhelming,” he said before arriving in Haiti on Sunday.

Nobody knows how many died in Tuesday’s quake. The Pan American Health Organization now says 50,000 to 100,000 people perished in the quake. Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said 100,000 would “seem to be the minimum.”

Yet President Rene Preval has made no broadcast address to his nation, nor has he been seen at any disaster site. Instead he has met Cabinet ministers and foreign visitors at a police station that serves as his base following the collapse of the National Palace.

“The government is a joke. The U.N. is a joke,” said 71-year-old Jacqueline Thermati, who lay in the dirt at a damaged old-age hospice — not far from Preval’s temporary headquarters — where dozens of elderly people were near death.

Story Continues →