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A crowd of Haitians desperately try to enter the Culture and communications ministry building where aid was being distributed in Port-au-Prince.
THONY BELIZAIRE / AFP / Getty
(PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti) — The aid flooding into Haiti by plane and boat is not reaching earthquake victims quickly enough to stem growing unrest because of transportation bottlenecks and isolated violence.
Many foreign aid workers and Haitians say ample donations are arriving, but express frustration at the slow pace of distribution of food and medicine from Port-au-Prince's port, airport and a warehouse in its sprawling Cite-Soleil slum.
"There's no top-down leadership. ... And since the Haitian government took control of our supplies, we have to wait for things even though they're stacked up in the warehouse," said Dr. Rob Maddox of Start, Louisiana, tending to dozens of patients in the capital's general hospital. "The situation is just madness."
U.S. air traffic controllers have lined up an astonishing 2,550 incoming flights through March 1, but some 25 flights a day aren't taking their slots. Communication breakdowns between Haitians and their foreign counterparts are endemic.
"Aid is bottlenecking at the Port-au-Prince airport. It's not getting into the field," said Mike O'Keefe, who runs Banyan Air Service in Fort Lauderdale.
Boxes of supplies are stacked to the ceiling in the dimly lit warehouse of the capital's hospital. In another storage area, medicine, bandages and other key supplies pile up on tables — watched over by a Haitian health worker who scrawls in a notebook, ticking off everything that comes in and out. Doctors say since locals took over the supply room, crucial time to save lives has been lost filling out unnecessary forms.
Donors talk about key logistical challenges: Grappling with a barely functioning government, the backlog of flights, a damaged and small port, clogged overland routes from outlying airports and the Dominican Republic, and security.
Aid agencies say food and water deliveries have about doubled in the past 10 days, but some relief workers are frustrated at how long it takes to move other supplies out of the U.N.'s warehouses.
U.N. officials said Tuesday that more than 100 ships are en route to Haiti, but the capital's port has limited capacity. Ships need their own cranes and other offloading equipment.
Traveling from the airport on the eastern edge of the capital to the western side of the city can take more than 3 hours. Travel by night is largely out — there are few functioning street lamps and, once the sun sets, countless survivors sleep in the streets.
Haiti has been plagued with crime, violence and gangs in the past, and some aid workers worry about being ambushed.
Most aid convoys require armed escorts, like the one that fired guns to drive away 20 armed men who blocked a road and tried to hijack a food shipment in the southern town of Jeremie. U.N. and Haitian police on Tuesday arrested 14 people suspected of participating in Saturday's attack, the U.N. said.
(NOTE)
1.Port-au-Prince (n.) 太子港(海地共和國首都)
2.stem (v.)遏止: to stop something from spreading or increasing, especially something bad:
例 These policies have helped to stem population loss.
3.unrest (n.)不安；動盪: angry or violent behavior by people who are protesting against something:
例 The capital city is facing growing political unrest.
4.bottleneck (n.)瓶頸 a specific problem in part of a process, that causes delays to the whole process:
例 bottlenecks in production, resulting from a lack of spare parts
5.warehouse (n.)倉庫a big building where large amounts of goods are stored
6.sprawling (a.) 蔓生的built over a wide area in an ugly or messy way:
例 a sprawling city
7.madness (n.)瘋狂: ideas and actions that show a lack of good judgment and careful thought:
例 This scheme is madness.
8.slot (n.)狹長口(文中只給飛機停的地方)a long narrow hole that you can fit something into:
例 He put a few more coins in the slot.
例 a space inside something, for example a computer, where you can fit a particular part
9.stacked (a.) (指女人)曲線很好的;體 態豐滿勻稱的: very rich
10.dimly (adv.)昏暗地 if you can dimly see or hear something, you can only just see or hear it because it is dark or far away:
例 He could dimly see the house ahead of him.
11.scrawl (v.)潦草的擬: to write something carelessly or in a hurry, so that it is difficult to read:
例 I quickly scrawled my address on a piece of paper.
12.ticking off (phr.) an occasion when someone speaks angrily to a person who has done something wrong
13.backlog (n.)儲備(金) an amount of work or other things that you should already have done or dealt with:
例 We're working weekends in order to clear a backlog of orders.
14.plague (v.)造成麻煩 [usually passive] to cause a lot of problems for someone or something for a long period of time:
例 The east coast has been plagued by blizzards for most of this month.
例 Although plagued by failing eyesight, he continues to lecture.
15.ambush (v./n.)埋伏 to attack someone after hiding and waiting for them:
例 The unwary tourists were ambushed and robbed while riding in the desert.
16.escort (n./v.)護衛(隊)a person or a group of people or vehicles that go somewhere with someone in order to protect them or prevent them from escaping:
例 You should not visit the area without an escort.
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