The latest email from Jay Newton-Small:
Here’s a story on the medical challenges still facing Haiti and why many of the 70+ people mirculously pulled from the rubble in the last nine days could still die. In fact there is a new wave of bodies now on the streets as people left untreated succumb. Even those who’ve been treated are still vulnerable: I saw at least two men who’d died within the last 12 hours with snowy fresh bandages on various limbs. Doctors’ biggest enemies these days are nternal bleeding, gangrene and crush syndrome and few hospitals are equipped to handle the complex surgeries these problems often entail.
On separate note, there was another aftershock today. No clue what it rated on the richter scale but we’d just been told that the building we were standing in — a one-floor white and blue concrete office that houses the UN’s press operations (amidst a slew of white and blue huts that I can’t help thinking of as smurfville) — had been condemned because its foundations were no longer solid. Of course when the floor started shaking everyone ran out screaming. Luckily, the panic was unwarranted.
On a happier note, I spent the afternoon at a nine-hole luxury golf course in Petion Ville. Instead of cucumber sandwiches and mint juleps, more than 250 soldiers with the 82nd Airborne Division (who looked to be sleeping on the pool chairs) handed out 10,000 meals and 210,000 bottles of water to estimated 50,000 people now living between (and on) the sand traps. This has become a daily occurrence since the soldiers got here on Saturday. The clinic they set up with 13 beds is swamped. One soldier, guiding a 13-year-old boy who was missing a third of his scalp to the clinic said no one minded the tough conditions. “People gripe about being deployed abroad, Iraq, Afghanistan. But every one rushed to put their hands up for this,” he said.
Downtown is still in rubble and many are developing a cough (myself included) from concrete dust meeting wet lungs. But the air today was clearer than I’ve seen it yet and there were more signs of “normal” activity. Touristy knick-knack stalls appeared at the airport exit selling African masks and suitcases. For the first time I went through a metal detector to get into the airport, though the guards made no comment about the 6-inch switch-blade the aid worker in front of me put on the x-ray belt. Banks re-opened yesterday and UN police helped form orderly lines today. Perhaps most tellingly: gas has gone down from a six-hour queue and $160 for a full tank to an hour and $60 to fill it up.