They were bloated and rotting in the hot sun, many thrown together in a macabre embrace. I stared appalled, not daring to breathe, at more than 1,000 abandoned dead outside this devastated city’s central mortuary, enveloped in a hellish stench of death.
A few yards away, I watched as hundreds of listless men, women and children, on filthy mats and bloodstained sheets, lay in the heat with broken limbs, beset by flies, still untreated since Tuesday’s catastrophic earthquake.
In the streets of central Port-au-Prince, people scrambled with bare hands at the concrete and rubble that had once been their homes, some just to retrieve loved ones they knew were dead. There was not an aid truck or an ambulance in sight.
Here in Port-au-Prince, where an estimated 50,000 Haitians were killed and 300,000 left homeless, anger was mounting yesterday amid frustration and disbelief that food, medicine and foreign rescue workers had still not materialised, nearly four days after the disaster.
Aid workers, still struggling to deliver the food, water and medical supplies so desperately needed, warned that more security was needed as the Haitians’ grief and shock began to turn to rage and blame. Last night most of the shops in the city had been looted, while the UN world food programme said that its warehouses had been ransacked for supplies.
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“We are waiting but we have had nothing yet,” Jean Claude Hillare shouted at me, standing in the central Champs de Mer, which has been turned into a shanty town of makeshift tents and destitute families.
“Nobody comes. Nobody,” he said in disgust, before turning to point at the flattened Air France building, a mass of giant concrete slabs and twisted metal entombing an unknown number of dead.
“There are still people under there,” Mr Hillare said. “For three days they shouted for help. Nobody came. They have stopped shouting now. They are dead. People are getting more and more angry. Where is the water? Where is the food?”
He begged me for help. “Here is my telephone number,” he said, pressing it into my hand. “Please, please, talk to somebody, do something.”
Outside the hospital, behind the devastated presidential palace, Marie Lourde Ulisse tended her seven-year-old son, Balnave, who lay on a mud-caked doormat with a gash across his head and a smashed foot.
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Her husband and two other children were killed in the earthquake. Her home was destroyed. “Nobody is helping. We have no help, no medicine, no food. What is happening?”
This is Port-au-Prince’s central hospital. Doctor Smith Lamarre said it has run out of all medicine. Standing yards from the abandoned dead, spread far and wide around the morgue, he said there were only 20 Haitian doctors in the clinic.
“The situation is critical. We have neither the tools nor the medicine to help the sick. We are waiting for the foreign doctors, who do not come. This is a crisis.”
As the daze and heat continue after the earthquake, officials now concede that thousands of bodies may never be recovered, or will be so decomposed by the time they are retrieved that they will be beyond recognition.
President Pr?val warned that thousands could end up unidentified in mass graves, robbed of the chance of being buried by their families.
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The murderous force of Tuesday’s earthquake was utterly random in the victims it chose. Officials say that about one building in ten was destroyed but in some parts of the city at least half were flattened.
Amid some of the worst scenes of devastation, tens of thousands of Haitians walked in the street, many wearing face masks or holding rags across their noses to block the stench emanating from the rubble, and from giant piles of garbage and food rotting on the pavements. Some even rammed limes up their noses to cope with the smell.
An angry crowd gathered at one collapsed building, much of their ire directed at a handful of heavily armed soldiers, who were stopping the crowd from helping the half-dozen Haitian search officials trying to find bodies and signs of life.
“I have a friend under there,” shouted an incensed Rusmond Beautrun, before being pushed back by a soldier.
Down in the huge central square, thousands sat under sheets or tarpaulins, cooking what little food they had, their homes gone. One man walked dazed and naked within the crowd. Most seemed to be just waiting for something — anything — to help. Near by, the once beautiful sparkling white Palace of Justice lies in ruins, as does the Ministry of Health. Two men with wheelbarrows picked at the wreckage, scavenging bits of metal and wood and scraps of paper. In this city I have visited twice before, I have been shot at, carjacked, and threatened with machetes. Yesterday the people seemed too consumed by what had befallen them to care about anything else, or any foreigners in their midst.
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At least one British citizen is among the missing. Ann Barnes, 59, a United Nations worker originally from Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, has been unaccounted for since Tuesday. Ms Barnes’s sister, Irene Marquet, said she felt sure her sister was among the casualties. “There’s been absolutely no trace. One wants to remain hopeful but it gets more and more difficult as time goes on,” said Mrs Marquet, a pensioner living in southern France.
Ms Barnes, who was working as personal assistant to the police commissioner, has been in Haiti for more than two years. The former British Airways stewardess had worked for the UN for more than 20 years.
Bizarrely, significant parts of Port-au-Prince are untouched. While some streets lie in ruins, neighbouring ones escaped unscathed. Already, many are trying to get a sense of normality back in their lives. I saw one woman sitting on the concrete roof of her destroyed home, trying to sell mangoes. On a pavement — nor far from a stiff, bloated body wrapped tightly in a white sheet — another woman had laid out a few plantains and oranges to sell.
And back in the central square, surrounded by the sick and homeless, about 50 women stood in one corner, singing in a beautiful Haitian cadence a favourite prayer in a country where a devotion to God always hangs thick in the air. “Jesus, You are great/We praise Your name. You make the sky and You miss nothing. All You do is good.”