Caring for sick, burying dead takes its toll

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Workers are carving out mass graves on a hillside north of Haiti's capital, using earthmovers to bury 10,000 people in a single day even as relief workers warn Haitians are still dying of injuries from the Jan. 12 quake for lack of medical care.

Clinics have 12-day waiting lists for patients, crushed arms and legs are festering, and makeshift camps that have sprung up in parks, streets and vacant lots now house an estimated 500,000 people, many in need of food, water and a doctor.

"The next health risk could include outbreaks of diarrhea, respiratory tract infections and other diseases among hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in overcrowded camps with poor or nonexistent sanitation," said Dr. Greg Elder, deputy operations manager for Doctors Without Borders in Haiti.

Concerns about sanitary conditions and disease outbreaks late yesterday prompted Haiti's government to announce it will resettle 400,000 earthquake survivors from the stricken capital to temporary camps outside town.

Presidential spokesman Fritz Longchamp said buses would start moving people in a week to 10 days, once the new camps are ready.

The European Commission now estimates 2 million homeless, while the death toll is estimated at 200,000, with 80,000 already buried in mass graves as of Wednesday.

In the sparsely populated wasteland of Titanyen, north of Port-au-Prince, burial workers said the macabre task of handling the never-ending flow of bodies was traumatizing.

"I have seen so many children, so many children. I cannot sleep at night and, if I do, it is a constant nightmare," said Foultone Fequiert, 38, his face covered with a T-shirt against the overwhelming stench.

The dead stick out at all angles from the mass graves - tall mounds of chalky dirt, the limbs of men, women and children frozen together in death.

"I received 10,000 bodies alone," Fequiert said.

Workers say they have no time to give the dead proper religious burials or follow pleas from the international community that bodies be buried in shallow graves from which loved ones might eventually retrieve them.