There is nowhere in Haiti more thoroughly demolished than L?ogâne, a sugar cane town with deep roots in voodoo and a church that would have been 500 years old in August.
Within about a minute last Tuesday the church disintegrated during afternoon Mass. In its place there is now a mountain of rubble hiding an unknown number of bodies. In the six days since, the only aid dispatched along the potholed 20-mile (30km) road from Port-au-Prince has been a single water truck.
The water came on Sunday, delivered by a local Roman Catholic charity. “Until then we had water from a hose but it’s not drinkable, and yesterday’s delivery was just a few hundred bottles,” said Alland Zetrelle, waiting for more outside a police compound.
He was not optimistic. “I have ten children who had nothing to eat this morning or yesterday or the day before that. There is nothing to buy and, anyway, I have no money. And there is not even a rumour of aid.”
L?ogâne was the nearest large town to the epicentre of the earthquake. Eighty per cent of the town was completely destroyed. In the luckier parts of Port-au-Prince the impact was random; here it was uniform and merciless — “like a long train crash”, said Alfred Saint-Fort beside the crushed remnants of his funeral home.
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The town’s population is about 120,000. No one knows how many died because there is no one left to make a list of the missing. The town hall still has two storeys but they have been broken open as if by a giant wrecking ball. The most senior official in town is a bewildered Cameroonian policeman on loan from the UN.
Estimates of the number of children buried under the remains of the ?cole des Frères, the ?cole des Soeurs and the ?cole des Infirmières range up to the thousands.
Yesterday youths tore down the tin roof of an annexe to the ?cole des Soeurs that survived the quake to start building shelters of their own. “When we find a body we carry it off to one side so people can come and bury it,” Mwaguel Guilaume, 16, said.
At the foot of the mound of masonry that was the church a woman waiting to use one of the town’s two working phone lines said: “We are living and sleeping in the streets not because we are afraid of aftershocks but because we have nowhere else.”
People here insist that the earthquake was an 8.2 magnitude, but whatever size it was it laid waste to the town with the efficiency of a creeping artillery barrage and the sound, one survivor said, of a mad bulldozer.
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Nearly a week later the UN has long since declared this the biggest humanitarian disaster in its history.
Before the earthquake struck, the UN compound an hour’s drive away was already one of the largest in the world, with permanent food stockpiles and a formidable fleet of aircraft, helicopters and lorries. But L?ogâne does not appear to be on the UN’s map.
Canadian military logistics experts drove through the town yesterday to assess its needs and then drove away. M?decins sans Frontières has set up a field clinic near the ?cole des Infirmières but few know about it. The wounded have left for the Dominican Republic if they can afford the ticket and withstand the eight-hour drive. Otherwise they lie and wait.
There was no looting yesterday in L?ogâne because there was nothing to loot. In Port-au-Prince, however, where markets have begun to reopen and the first convoys of lorries from the border and the airport are beginning to get through, the pickings are richer and violence is mounting.
Youths swarmed over the ruins of shops in the downtown districts between the cathedral and the port, pulling open boxes of anything they could find and running for cover when Haitian police appeared. “When we were there they knew they were safe,” a photographer for The Wall Street Journal said. “Then the police ordered us away and started shooting.”
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At least one thief was summarily killed by police on Sunday and was left, his skull shattered, on the pavement. At least two more were lynched by onlookers.
Outside an industrial park near the airport a huge crowd confronted Peruvian UN riot police, demanding to be let in to a rumoured field hospital set up inside.
“Many people here have sick children but we also know that there’s food in there and they’re not sharing it. That’s the main reason that we’re here,” said Peter Paul, begging The Times to send an e-mail message to a friend in the US.
“Tell my friends about our situation. Ask them to help.”
Despite repeated assurances that US and extra UN military personnel will be deployed to maintain security in Port-au-Prince, there is still little sign of them. In their absence the vastly outnumbered Haitian police are not slow to resort to lethal force — yet neither are they in control.