PORT-AU-PRINCE – Rescuers pulled a dehydrated but otherwise uninjured woman from the ruins of a luxury hotel in the Haitian capital early on Sunday, an event greeted with applause from onlookers witnessing rare good news in a city otherwise filled with corpses, rubble and desperation. "It's a little miracle," the woman's husband, Reinhard Riedl, said after hearing she was alive in the wreckage. "She's one tough cookie. She is indestructible." For many, though, the five days since the magnitude-7.0 quake hit have turned into an aching wait for the food, water and medical care slowly making its way from an overwhelmed airport rife with political squabbles. And while aid is reaching the country, growing impatience among the suffering has spawned some violence. Nobody knows how many died in Tuesday's quake. Haiti's government alone has already recovered 20,000 bodies – not counting those recovered by independent agencies or relatives themselves, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told reporters. The Pan American Health Organisation now says 50,000 to 100,000 people perished in the quake. Bellerive said 100,000 would "seem to be the minimum." Relief workers struggled for the fifth day yesterday to assist desperate earthquake survivors amid anger over the chaotic aid effort, as two former US presidents admitted the country's recovery will be long. US helicopters crews flew in and unloaded boxes of vital supplies as massive queues formed at distribution points where the UN's World Food Programme handed out high-energy food. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon arrived to Haiti to discuss how to support relief efforts in the earthquake-hit nation. Ban told reporters yesterday that he had three priorities in Haiti: saving as many lives as possible, stepping up humanitarian assistance and ensuring the coordination of the huge amount of aid coming into the country. "We should not waste one dollar of aid," Ban said. Ban said the UN is feeding 40,000 people, and expects that figure to rise to 2 million within a month. He said it was one of the most serious humanitarian crises in decades, and also a tragedy for the UN, which is missing hundreds of personnel. "This is the gravest and greatest single loss in the history of our organisation," Ban said. Aid continued to trickle in but failed to reach many of those most in need after Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude earthquake brought death and misery on an unprecedented scale to the impoverished and dysfunctional Caribbean nation. The Haitian government has established 14 distribution points for food and other supplies, and US Army helicopters scouted locations for more. Aid groups opened five emergency health centres. Vital gear, such as water-purification units, was arriving from abroad. On a hillside golf course, perhaps 50,000 people were sleeping in a makeshift tent city overlooking the stricken capital. Paratroopers of the US 82nd Airborne Division flew there Saturday to set up a base for handing out water and food. After the initial frenzy among the waiting crowd, when helicopters could only hover and toss out their cargo, a second flight landed and soldiers passed out some 2,000 military-issue ready-to-eat meals to an orderly line of Haitians. But aid delivery was still bogged down by congestion at the Port-au-Prince airport, quake damage at the seaport, poor roads and the fear of looters and robbers. "Many people are just fleeing to the countryside, they are looking for a place to stay and for food," said Enel Legrand, a 24-year-old Haitian volunteer aid worker.
