In Haitian town, aid is but a rumor

“We can’t find anything to give the baby,’’ said Toussaint, sitting in a sweltering hut flung together with corrugated metal, plywood, and flimsy bedsheets. “Some of us haven’t eaten for more than a week,’’ said Elvine Casseus, 48, as she washed clothes nearby.

While tens of thousands of people are fed daily in Haiti’s teeming capital, the mammoth life-saving effort has yet to reach countless places like this fetid patch of makeshift housing, just 18 miles of nearly impassable roads away.

Carmen Joseph - the 82-year-old matriarch of the camp, constructed by 200 people whose homes lay in ruins across the street - said she is not surprised that her village is being over looked. “They never give us help.’’

The problem is that Haiti has no working government, its already hobbled infrastructure obliterated by the earthquake, which destroyed the buildings that housed the corridors of power and scattered the bureaucrats who now are tending to their own shattered families.

The mayor of Leogane, where at least 3,300 people were killed, has driven past the shantytown without stopping, its residents said. And the Canadian troops who are based here have been patrolling but are not supposed to distribute food directly, said Master Corporal Jacques Bisson of the Canadian army.

“Nobody is coming to see them,’’ said Sam Moly, 31, a US citizen born in Haiti who returned to Leogane from Florida to help his native country. “No one is coming to do anything.’’

When help was offered, he said, even those efforts disintegrated into chaos because of poor organization. A food line set up by the United Nations just 150 yards from the shantytown, Moly said, was shut down after only a few days because of violence in the pushing, shoving, and hungry crowd that converged here from across the rural west.

Now, no outside food is reaching the shantytown, whose residents said they are surviving on fruit from nearby trees and the dwindling supplies they had salvaged from their flattened homes.

Casseus said she and the others are afraid to venture to town, a mile away, where the quake has fashioned an unending tableau of destruction and despair.

Near the center of Leogane, a woman put her head in her hands, sitting near a bowl she had filled with candy and rum bottles that no one had the money or motivation to buy.

“Thousands of people died here in less than a minute,’’ the woman said, as her sick 7-year-old son, languid and doleful, sat behind her.

The frustration in Leogane has prompted a surge of violence among people who are increasingly hungry and desperate.

“People are starting to fight for food,’’ Casseus said. “They are fighting with knives, and they are starting to kill each other.’’

Still, amid the devastation, signs of hope are emerging.

Men of the shantytown spend their days clearing rubble from the ruined homes and clogged culverts. And the huts, although shockingly primitive, are orderly inside. The flooring, often a piece of cardboard laid on the dirt, is swept clean. Everything has its place, and even teddy bears and toiletries are arranged neatly on small tables and dressers.

In the town, where century-old wooden buildings fared better than their modern cinderblock counterparts, Bogour Evoyel, 42, enjoyed an outdoor haircut from a barber who powered his razor from a car battery. The inflated price amid the rubble: $1.50.

Another hopeful sign was that help is getting nearer: On Friday, just a few miles west of this shantytown, a company of US Marines set up command on a patch of grass they’ve dubbed Camp Kilo. The 150 Marines have begun patrolling, identifying local leaders, and sharing their assessments with relief agencies.

“We’re asking who’s in charge, who needs help, and how can we help them,’’ said Lieutenant Brian Green, the tobacco-chewing executive officer of the company, part of the 22d Marine Expeditionary Unit.

So far, Green said, the Marines have delivered 6,138 cases of rations and 1,713 cases of bottled water to the area, supplemented by 1,200 5-gallon containers of water donated from their own supplies.

Still, that’s a drop in the vast bucket of need here. Green, a 26-year-old from Vero Beach, Fla., acknowledged the enormous task that his company faces.

When told about the unvisited shantytown down the road, Green nodded, shook his head, and spat out a chew of tobacco.

“There’s just so many,’’ he said. “We just arrived here. We’re doing the best we can.’’

The destitute in the shantytown, however, desperately hope that someone’s best efforts reach them - or at least that someone notices them - soon.

“This is the work of God, what happened,’’ said Blanchard Orlando, a hungry 17-year-old dressed in a bandanna, black blazer, and knee-length shorts. “But the government should at least say something to us.’’

As they wait, Casseus said, she and her neighbors will continue to care for one another. Day by day, she said, they will summon a patient, stubborn resilience to see another sun rise.

They have no choice. Otherwise, Casseus said, “we will stay here, and we will die here. We have nowhere else to go.’’