Religious Groups Fill Haiti Government Gaps

From The Wall Street Journal-

Outside a red and gray Coleman tent, a boy sat mute in a wheelchair holding a dented metal bowl of yellow gruel. His arms were laced with pus-filled wounds, flies swarmed around his grotesquely swollen ankles, and his right foot was missing its littlest toe—but he was lucky. Not only had he escaped the school for the disabled, where many of his handicapped classmates were crushed to death, but he had found his way to what passes for an oasis in this city of death and ruin: a camp run by the Episcopal church.

In a country whose government has all but stopped functioning, in a city whose crowded shanties remain largely unreached by aid cargoes, it has fallen to communities on the ground to fill the gap as best they can.

Religious missions, with their deep community connections, are proving to be particularly critical conduits of help, both spiritual and material.

Catholic Relief Services has started turning a golf course in the neighborhood of Pétionville into one of the first formal camps for the homeless.

Some Haitian government officials say between one million to three million people may have been displaced by the quake. Thousands of tons of food and medical supplies have been shipped to Haiti, but much of it remains trapped in warehouses, or diverted to the neighboring Dominican Republic.

More here-

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704320104575015502368917126.html