Hope amid the carnage

AMID the chaos and the carnage, a signal of hope and life emerges from the rubble and devastation of Haiti’s earthquake.

It came yesterday in the tiny form of two-year-old Redjeson Hausteen Claude as rescuers plucked him from the ruins of his home in Port-au-Prince.

This dramatic photograph captured the moment when Félix del Amo, a Spanish rescuer, pulled the terrified child from the collapsed house. Dirty and teary-eyed, the little boy’s eyes lit up as he was lifted into the arms of his parents, Daphnee and Reginald Claude.

Juan Carlos Abad, head of the Spanish fire rescue team, said: “I spoke to the team the night before the rescue. They told me the building was dangerous, there was leaking water and the structure was unsound but they thought there was life there. We are very moved by what has happened and very proud of what they have done.”

The rescue of little Redjeson heralds the first ray of real hope as the international aid effort finally begins to take effect in the aftermath of Tuesday’s catastrophic earthquake.

Amid the death and devastation in Haiti, remarkable tales of survival began to emerge yesterday as rescuers searched the debris for signs of life.

Sarla Chand, 65, an American physician, was rescued from what used to be the Montana Hotel after being trapped in the dark for more than 50 hours.

Rezene Tesfamariam, Haiti director of the charity Plan International, said people were using basic tools such as shovels or pick-axes and even their bare hands in a desperate bid to dig out loved ones buried under collapsed buildings.

But despite these huge efforts, tales of heartbreak abound as small, personal tragedies continue to unfold. In the Petionville suburb of Haiti’s capital, friends held back Kettely Clerge who sobbed as neighbours with bare hands tried to dig out her nine-year-old goddaughter, Harryssa Keem Clerge, pleading for rescue, from beneath their home’s rubble.

“There’s no police, there’s nobody,” her godmother cried. By the end of the day, the girl was dead.

Haitian President Rene Preval said that 7,000 people have already been buried in a mass grave. Hundreds of corpses piled up outside the city’s morgue, next to a hospital struggling to prevent those numbers from rising.

As part of a major United Nations humanitarian effort, the Irish Government is to send 85 tonnes of emergency supplies to Haiti as part of the international aid effort.

Three members of Ireland’s Rapid Response Corps will travel to Haiti over the coming days, with 35 more on standby.

Despite these signs of hope, however, the vast majority of Haitians faced a second round of tragedy as the country struggled to handle the first trickle of the vast amount of international aid.

Relief flights were turned back from Haiti’s tiny airport on Thursday night and the port remained closed yesterday.

Emergency aid supplies were piling up a few hundred miles away in the Dominican Republic, which occupies the other half of the island of Hispaniola.

Roadblocks made of piled-up corpses were built to protest at the delay in distributing aid.