The need is still immense in Haiti

Haiti is beginning to fade from the top headlines, and that is a big concern for the people rebuilding the country. The chaotic aid efforts just prior to the earthquake are starting to see more challenges and needs throughout the country are still at a high level.

The many amputees that the earthquake caused have been left to handle their new life on their own, many without crutches. Also, new health issues are arising daily due to the lack of sanitation, and there is no plan with what to with all the people who have been without shelter for a month.

From The Washington Post writer Peter Slevin gives us this update.

Pressure will grow on a fledgling food distribution network backed by U.S. soldiers that so far has largely managed to deliver only rice. From surgery to shelter to sanitation to schooling, the needs are vast and the international commitment unproven.

"The need is so overwhelming. You can't have an initial push, and then it stops. That just won't be enough," Lane Hartill, an Africa-based Catholic Relief Services staff member, said as he walked toward a sweltering encampment of 30,000 people who have spent every hour outdoors since the Jan. 12 earthquake. In the distance, the dun-colored shapes of the makeshift shelters might have been an impressionist painter's rendering of despair.

The sadness is sometimes suffocating, yet the agony of last month's earthquake is being overtaken by the urgency of now. Every day, tens of thousands of Haitians face a grueling quest to find food, any food. A nutritious diet is out of the question.
No shelter, no jobs

Shelter is a slender part of the equation because, for those who lost their homes, there is so little shelter to seek. Hundreds of people join lines before the early dawn in hopes of scoring a sack of white rice, but there is nowhere to line up for a tent, a shelter kit or a home any sturdier than a blanket hanging from a clothesline.

Hardly anyone is being paid. For the vast majority, a daily job is out of the question. Every school in the capital is closed, an estimated 75 percent of them destroyed. Many businesses and government offices simply no longer exist. There is no postal service -- and if there were, much of the Port-au-Prince population would not be found at home.

The medical calamity has moved beyond the horrific early days of assembly line amputations. Overwhelmed doctors and nurses are now facing converging streams of need, from untended wounds and the illnesses born of poor sanitation to the ailments of a population that had inferior health care long before Jan. 12.

There are not enough crutches for amputees or people to teach them how to adjust to the physics of their new bodily dimensions. The demands for treatment of all kinds, including postoperative care and rehabilitation, are "massive," said Thomas Kirsch, a Johns Hopkins University physician and disaster expert working here with the International Medical Corps.

"We're seeing as many as 500 people a day in our dinky little health-care center," Kirsch said, after spending a 10-hour shift doing triage in the courtyard of the state university hospital. "We send paralyzed patients out with their families and say, 'Good luck.' "