In Haiti, worries over 1 million children

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - A crowd of looters pulled a man yesterday from the rubble of a store that had been repeatedly scavenged, and called for help from U.S. soldiers, who treated him for a broken leg and severe dehydration.

Rico Dibrivell, 35, claimed he had been trapped since the earthquake two weeks earlier, but the military gave no details about how he managed to survive.

The Miami Herald reported that Dibrivell, found two blocks from the Port-au-Prince Cathedral on Rue de Miracle, had a broken leg and severe dehydration. Through yesterday, 135 people had been rescued from collapsed buildings.

Meanwhile, children with no names lay mute in a corner of the General Hospital grounds, three among thousands of boys and girls set adrift in the wake of Haiti's earthquake.

"Hi, Joe, how are you?" the American doctor tried, using a pet name the staff had given a boy of about 11.

There was no response.

"Joe," "Baby Sebastian" and the girl who didn't even have a nickname hadn't spoken or cried since they were brought in over the previous 48 hours - by neighbors, passersby, no one knows who. "Sebastian," only a week old, was said to have been taken from the arms of his dead mother.

They're lucky: Haitian-born Dr. Winston Price and the staff were treating them for infections and other ailments. Hundreds of thousands of other hungry and thirsty children are scattered among Port-au-Prince's squatter camps of survivors, without protection against disease or child predators - often with nobody to care for them.

UNICEF has established a special tent camp for girls and boys separated from their parents in the Jan. 12 quake. The Connecticut-based Save the Children has set up "Child Spaces" in 13 makeshift settlements. The Red Cross and other groups are working to reunite families and get children into orphanages.

The post-quake needs of Haiti's children have outrun available help. Some youngsters have been released from hospitals with no one to care for them. There just aren't enough beds.

The plight of the young is poignant even in a country where the UN estimates a third of the 9 million population needs international assistance in the quake's aftermath.

In Port-au-Prince's streets, alleys and crumbled doorways, handwritten messages begged for help. In the Juvenat neighborhood, a group of 50 families hung a white sheet from a doorway, with this plea scrawled in green: "We need food assistance, water and medicine."

Thousands pressed against Haitian police at a food-distribution site in the Cite Soleil slum. Police swung sticks to beat back the crowd.

Brazilian troops in armored personnel carriers controlled a tightly packed line of survivors waiting for food by firing pepper spray and training their guns on the jostling, rowdy crowd. One soldier returned their taunts by shouting back insults in Creole. "They treat us like animals, they beat us but we are hungry people," said Muller Bellegarde.