In Haitian Town, Desperation Reigns

(CBS)  In Leogone, a small Haitian town just 15 miles from Port-au-Prince, nearly 85 percent of the town is destroyed and the coffin maker there was told to stop making coffins because there are just too many bodies, reports CBS News Correspondent Kelly Cobiella.

"All of them go in the same holes," the coffin maker said through a translator, choking on some parts. "That's the reason he stopped making those baskets."

Here people are desperate for food and water. Hundreds line up outside the police station looking for help. Five days after the quake, no relief agencies have been here to help and the local Haitian police force left town.

Complete Coverage: Devastation in Haiti

"It's terrible out here, so many people dying and the ground still shaking," one man said

People are desperate to get out of here to get somewhere safer.

Yvroses Dotreche, 42, says she just stepped out to buy groceries before the quake struck. It saved her life.

She lost her husband, her sister and her 13 year old daughter who are still buried in the rubble. All she has left is the clothes on her back.

"She don't have nothing left, everything under the house," Dotreche said through a translator.

For five years the Rev. Marat Guirand has been the Catholic priest at the town's nearly 500 year old church. He doesn't know what he will say at Sunday Mass.

"God only knows," Guirand said.

In the city of Carrefour a town of 500,000 people, there is confusion and chaos.

"Nothing, nothing, nothing has been given to nobody," one survivor said.





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THE WICKED GENE IN RUSH LIMBAUGH

The crisis in Haiti presents one of those moments when humanity comes together to be one another?s keepers. But, alas, the flow of the milk of human kindness appears obstructed in the veins of some rightwing ideologues. Thus, they see in the Haitian catastrophe, not a pressing emergency, not an opportunity to embrace humanity, but to be its enemy. Rush Limbaugh is riled up against massive US intervention. ?Pastor? Pat Robertson used the occasion to talk about the ?sins? and ?curse? of Haiti, a position he doesn?t usually take on US yearly disasters, except for ?Katrina? which he attributed to gay ?sins.? This pastor seems to have forgotten Christ?s criteria for admission to the Kingdom: ?I was naked and you clothed me; I was hungry and you gave me food . ..? A Republican Senator saw an occasion to say, not words of comfort, but wicked things to Haitians in the US whose countrymen are in dire need and dying. Reinhold Neibuhr, the renowned author of the Moral Man and Immoral Society had suggested that the sentiments of sympathy and benevolence cannot flow unless there is understanding and perception of the needs of others. The Haitian crisis provides heartbreaking visual information. How can anyone not see?and not understand the urgency of the need? Any one will a sensitive moral conscience will. One day in a hospital bed, Rush may yet receive, unaware, a Haitian blood in his blood therapy. Someday!
Dr. Sam