Haitians Bury Dead, Fight for Life

Coffee-colored floodwaters seeped away Friday from a muddy lake covering what once was the heart of a village, offering up a few more bodies of the estimated 1,000 people who died here.

The receding tide overnight revealed 29 more bloated corpses of villagers killed by the river of rock and water that plunged from surrounding mountains four days earlier onto the 16,000 people in the village and its environs.

Like more than 300 other victims found this week, these bodies were swiftly buried to stave off disease. Grieving survivors didn’t even have time to try to identify them.

Government officials and U.S. Marines, part of a multinational force keeping the peace in Haiti, estimated that perhaps 1,000 people died here. They are among perhaps 2,000 people killed in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, by days of heavy rain, flooding and mudslides at the beginning of the rainy season.

“My children are still in the water. They died, but no one can find them,” wailed Elisema Etienne, salt crusted in the corners of her ebony eyes from tears shed for the loss of seven of her eight children.

Her husband, David, managed to grab only 10-year-old Michle as they fled the debris-laden torrent.

The child’s skull, arms and back had been gouged by debris. After four days without food or clean water, Michle sat listlessly in the lap of his father with his eyes swollen shut and complained of pain every time he moved.

The Etiennes and hundreds of others stunned by their losses gathered at a high clearing after the burial, summoned to the site by the thumping rotors of Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters of the U.S.-led multinational force. They were coming to provide the first food and medical help since the predawn disaster Monday.

Ensign Brad McLaughlin, a Navy physician’s assistant, probed Michle’s head wound, the size and shape of a quarter and encrusted with blood, pus and flies.

“We’re going to transport him to Port-au-Prince,” said McLaughlin. “He’s got a huge infection, and he’ll die if we don’t.”

Two hours after the child was flown off to the capital, his mother waited with more than 1,000 other villagers in orderly rows, all clutching cards from the U.N. World Food Program issued the previous day in preparation for the handouts. But a harsh gust from the rotors of one Chinook that landed too close to the hungry masses blew the cards out of hundreds of hands, setting off a panicked scramble and delaying by more than three hours the distribution of rice, flour and cooking oil.

At the end of the six-hour operation, when supplies ran out, less than half of the registered families had gotten their rations, setting desperate have-nots against the weaker of those dragging off sacks and bottles.

As the last Marines and the dozen aid workers they were protecting boarded their helicopter with promises to return today, men with sticks were seen beating an old woman who draped herself over a 100-pound rice sack to keep it from being stolen.

Children orphaned in the flood have yet to be included in the distribution, an aid effort daunted by the magnitude of the disaster, which has made tens of thousands homeless.

Dieubond Jean-Batard, 12, who was wearing a tattered oxford shirt with only one button and tennis shoes revealing all 10 toes through flapping fabric, said he was looking for an uncle who he hoped had survived. Both of his parents and two sisters disappeared into the muddy waters.

“There’s enough here to feed everyone for a few days, but the problem is the distribution. We’ve organized them into neighborhoods, and one person gets the ration for four families. But there are more people than we expected,” said Guy Gaubreau of the World Food Program.

This verdant southeastern corner of Haiti, where corn and fruit are grown, had long been one of the few areas capable of supplying its own food.

The disaster struck a rare enclave of peace and self-sufficiency in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, which once again has been struggling with political unrest and armed rebellion. But Haitians, who freed themselves from colonial oppression in a bloody slave rebellion 200 years ago, say they have long been familiar with suffering. They point to a favorite proverb about a history replete with tragedy and trials: Beyond the mountains, there are more mountains.

At least 200 people have died elsewhere in Haiti. At least half of the 1,000 Mapou residents missing and presumed dead were children. An equal proportion of the young and weak died just across the border in the Dominican Republic, whose toll of dead and missing from the deluges exceeds 800.

Rebu Acra, a 45-year-old seamstress, had been mending the tattered rags that clothe her 14 children when the deluge struck at 2 a.m. She had gotten up to fetch a candle from an outdoor shed when she heard the roar of rushing debris and water and instinct set her running for high ground.

“My house is destroyed,” she said, still struggling to believe it. “Everyone is gone.”

Nearly two weeks of daily storms at the beginning of the rainy season set off the deadly mudslides across southern Haiti. But an underlying factor in the disaster is rampant deforestation.

Desperate to earn money in a country where the average income is less than $1 a day, Haitians defied forest preservation decrees and chopped down shrubs and bushes to use the wood for cooking fuel or making charcoal. Rain washed the exposed soil on the mountainsides into the lowlands, filling folds in the rolling emerald hillsides, including the diamond-shaped depression that was Mapou’s center.

“No one knew this could happen,” said Emile Emmanuel, a 42-year-old farmer who lost his wife and all six children. “We were making a good life here.”

Although floodwaters were slowly receding in the narrow basin, revealing the tops of structures sturdy enough to have withstood the inundation, fresh rainstorms threatened from the steel-gray clouds hovering over mountain ridges that still bear beige tracks of Monday’s mudslides.

Rain was forecast through the weekend, and nightly downpours could continue through November.

Beyond the clouds, there are more clouds.