A crowd of about 100 people tried to shove through a metal gate in Haiti's capital as a guard with a baton pushed them back, threatening to hit them. Undeterred, children and adults, some carrying babies, kept elbowing each other trying to enter. "Let us in! We're hungry!" they shouted on a recent afternoon, the AP reports. They were trying to get into a makeshift shelter in an abandoned school. Inside, workers dipped ladles into buckets filled with soup that they poured into Styrofoam containers stuffed with rice to distribute to Haitians who have lost homes to gang violence. About 1.4 million people are on the verge of famine, and more than 4 million require food aid, sometimes eating once a day or not at all, aid groups say.
"Haiti is facing a protractive and mass hunger," said Jean-Martin Bauer, Haiti director for the United Nations' World Food Program. He noted that Croix-des-Bouquets, in the eastern part of Haiti's capital, "has malnutrition rates comparable with any war zone in the world." Officials are trying to rush food, water, and medical supplies to makeshift shelters and other places as gang violence suffocates lives across Port-au-Prince and beyond, with many trapped in their homes. Only a few aid organizations have been able to restart since Feb. 29, when gangs began attacking key institutions, burning police stations, shutting down the main international airport with gunfire and storming two prisons, releasing more than 4,000 inmates.
The violence forced Prime Minister Ariel Henry to announce Tuesday that he would resign once a transitional council is created, but gangs demanding his ouster have continued their attacks. Bauer and other officials said that the gangs are blocking distribution routes and paralyzing the main port. WFP's warehouse is running out of grains, beans, and vegetable oil. "That has me terrified," he said. Marie Lourdes Geneus, a 45-year-old street vendor and mother of seven children, said gangs chased her family out of three homes before they ended up at the shelter. "If you look around, there are a lot of desperate people who look like me, who had a life and lost it," she said, adding, "I made a lot of effort in life and look where I end up, trying to survive."
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