UN officials insist emergency relief is now starting to get through in quake hit Haiti, but Channel 4 News Producer Hannah Storm says many aid supplies remain piled up at the airport.
I am sitting a couple of hundred metres away from the runway of Port au Prince airport and I am frustrated. I wonder if I am allowed to say that as a journalist. But, having been in Haiti for the past few days, I realise normal rules no longer apply.
We’ve just returned from a makeshift hospital less than a mile from here. Run by Dominicans, guarded by Peruvian UN soldiers, it is surrounded by desperate Haitians, who don’t understand Spanish and are hungry, injured and frustrated.
Behind the gates of this former industrial park, people are still dying. There are few supplies, few surgeons, no operating rooms. People are treated on clumsy wooden tables and sleep beneath trees. We see a body bag, containing another of Haiti’s countless earthquake victims. Many more have critical injuries, internal bleeding and massive fractures. They need urgent help.
They lie on the floor, on blankets in the dirt, as helicopters and planes come in to land at the airport. So close, but yet so far.
A week after the earthquake, aid is still not reaching them.
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