PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti: Haitians are fleeing their quake-ravaged capital by the hundreds of thousands, aid officials said Friday, as their government promised to help nearly a half-million more move from squalid camps on curbsides and vacant lots into safer, cleaner tent cities.
Doctors said a 69-year-old woman was pulled from the wreckage of a building on Friday, 10 days after the magnitude-7.0 quake, but some teams were giving up the search and efforts focused on expanding aid for survivors.
Aid officials said some 200,000 people have crammed into buses, nearly swamped ferries and set out even on foot to escape the ruined capital. For those who stay, foreign engineers have started leveling land on the fringes of the city for tent cities, supposedly temporary, that are meant to house 400,000 people.
The goal is to halt the spread of disease at hundreds of impromptu settlements that have no water and no place for sewage. Homeless families have erected tarps and tents, cardboard and scrap as shelter from the sun, but they will be useless once the summer rainy season hits.
The new camps “are going to be going to places where they will have at least some adequate facilities,” Fritz Longchamp, chief of staff to President Rene Preval, told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Doctors treating the newly rescued woman said she was in bad shape after being trapped for so long. “There is very little hope, but we are trying to save her life,” Dr. Ernest Benjamin told The Associated Press.
Doctors at Haiti’s General Hospital were treating the woman with oxygen and intravenous fluids.
Thursday was the first day since the quake in which nobody was pulled alive from the ruins, UN mission spokesman David Wimhurst said.
“We all hope that others have survived and can be found, but the more days that go by without signs of life, the dimmer these hopes will become,” he said.
Armies of foreign aid donors, instead, turned their attention to expanding their pipeline of food, water and medical care for survivors.
The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said Friday that children have gone missing from hospitals in Haiti since the devastating earthquake struck, raising fears of trafficking for adoption abroad.
“We have documented let’s say around 15 cases of children disappearing from hospitals and not with their own family at the time,” said UNICEF adviser Jean Luc Legrand.
“UNICEF has been working in Haiti for many years and we knew the problem with the trade of children in Haiti which existed already beforehand, and unfortunately many of these trade networks have links with the international adoption ‘market’,” Legrand explained.
The agency underlined that it had warned countries during the past week not to step up adoptions from Haiti in the immediate wake of the quake.
Several are fast-tracking adoption procedures already under way, including Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the United States.
