Haitians mourn quake victim archbishop
Hundreds gathered for the funeral of the archbishop of Haiti’s earthquake-stricken capital, in a rare formal ceremony that captured the collective mourning of a shattered nation where mass graves hold many of the dead.
Meanwhile, as the United Nations said the Haitian government had declared an end to searches for living people trapped in the rubble, yet another survivor was rescued.
French officials said they reached the 23-year-old man by digging a tunnel through the wreckage of a fruit and vegetable shop where the man had been buried for 11 days.
He was placed on a stretcher and given intravenous fluids as onlookers cheered. Rescuers said he was in good health.
“Life doesn’t stop when a government says stop,” said Lt Col Christophe Renou, a French Civil Protection official who is part of a team working at the site.
“There is still some hope, but it is going to take some luck and God’s help because there are so many destroyed buildings.”
Authorities have stopped short of explicitly directing all teams to halt rescue efforts and hopeful searchers continued picking through the ruins.
But UN relief workers say the shift in focus is critical to care for the thousands living in squalid, makeshift camps that lack sanitation.
While deliveries of food, medicine and water have ticked up after initial logjams, the need continues to be overwhelming and doctors fear outbreaks of disease in the camps.
Some 132 people have been pulled alive from beneath collapsed buildings by international search and rescue teams.
Experts say the chance of saving trapped people begins diminishing after 72 hours. One mother still missing her children said it’s too soon to give up.
“Maybe there’s a chance they’re still alive,” said Nicole Abraham, 33, wiping away tears as she spoke of hearing the cries of her children aged six and 15 for the first two days after the quake.
Only a small number of funerals have been held since the 7.0-magnitude quake struck on January 12, with most people buried anonymously and without ceremony in mass graves on the outskirts of the city.
An estimated 200,000 people died, according to Haitian government figures cited by the European Commission. The United Nations said Saturday the government had preliminarily confirmed 111,481 bodies, but that figure does not account for corpses buried by relatives.
While the two-hour ceremony in Port-au-Prince was held for Msgr Joseph Serge Miot and vicar Charles Benoit, who also perished in the earthquake, people in the crowd of about 2,000 wept for deeply personal losses.
“We feel like we have lost everything. Our child, our country, our friend,” said Junior Sant Juste, a 30-year-old father whose three-year-old daughter died when his home collapsed.
The Mass, celebrated in a small park near the collapsed cathedral, offered “a way to share the pain and find solidarity,” said his wife, Roth Boisrond.
As many as 200,000 people have fled the city of two million, according to the US Agency for International Development.
About 609,000 people are homeless in the capital’s metropolitan area and the United Nations estimates that up to one million could leave Haiti’s destroyed cities for rural areas already struggling with extreme poverty.
