By AP
About 100 people were trying to push across a metal fence in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, as a guard pushed them back by threatening to hit them with a baton.
Undeterred, children and adults alike, some with babies in their arms, continued elbowing each other to try to get inside.
“Let us in! We are hungry!"
, they shouted one recent afternoon.
They were trying to access a makeshift shelter in an abandoned school.
Inside, workers dipped ladles into buckets full of soup and poured them into Styrofoam containers filled with rice to distribute to those left homeless by gang violence.
About 1.4 million Haitians are on the brink of famine and more than 4 million need food assistance, according to aid groups, which said they sometimes eat only once a day, or not at all.
A person pours soup into a container while several children line up to receive food at a shelter for families displaced by gang violence, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on March 14. Odelyn Joseph / AP
“Haiti is facing a prolonged and massive famine,” Jean-Martin Bauer, director of the United Nations World Food Program for the country, told The Associated Press.
In Croix-des-Bouquets, in the eastern part of the capital, there are “malnutrition rates comparable to those of any war zone in the world.”
Authorities are trying to get food, water and medicine to makeshift shelters and elsewhere as gang violence chokes life in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere, with many people trapped in their homes.
Only a few humanitarian organizations have been able to resume their activities since February 29, when gangs began attacking key institutions, burning police stations, closing the international airport with gunfire and attacking two prisons, freeing more than 4,000 inmates.
[Armed men try to take control of Haiti airport]
The situation forced Prime Minister Ariel Henry to announce early Tuesday that he will resign as soon as a transition council is created.
But groups demanding his removal from power have continued their attacks in several communities.
Bauer and other officials said gangs are blocking distribution routes and paralyzing the country's main port, and that the World Food Program warehouse is running out of grain, beans and vegetable oil while it continues to deliver meals.
“We have supplies for a few weeks.
"I'm saying weeks, not months," Bauer noted.
“This has me terrified.”
Inside the makeshift shelter at the school, things were somewhat more orderly and hundreds of people were lining up to receive food.
The more than 3,700 people who take refuge there compete for a place to sleep and to share a hole in the floor as a toilet.
Marie Lourdes Geneus, a 45-year-old street vendor and mother of seven, said the gangs kicked her family out of three different homes until they ended up in the shelter.
“If you look around, there are a lot of desperate people who, like me, had a life and have lost it
,” he said.
“This is a horrible life.
“I’ve worked hard in life and look where I’ve ended up, trying to survive.”
From time to time she goes out to try to sell beans to buy some extra food for her children — who sometimes eat only once a day — but ends up being chased by armed men and throwing her produce on the ground as she runs.
[USA. sends soldiers to Haiti to protect its embassy from gangs and evacuates non-essential personnel]
Another of the refugees at the school, Erigeunes Jeffrand, 54, explained that he used to make a living selling up to four wheelbarrow loads of sugar cane a day, but recently gangs kicked him and his four children out of his neighborhood.
“My house was completely destroyed and vandalized,” he said.
“They took everything I had.
And now they don't even let me work.”
He sent his two youngest children to live with relatives in a quieter rural area of the country, while the two oldest children stayed with him.
“Can you believe I had a house?” he noted.
“It arrived at the end of the month.
But now I depend on what people give me to eat.
“This is not a life.”
More than 200 gangs are believed to operate in Haiti, of which almost two dozen are in and around Port-au-Prince.
Now they control 80% of the capital and are trying to take over more territory.
Dozens of people have died in the latest attacks and more than 15,000 have been left homeless.
The situation has prevented groups like Food for the Hungry from working at a time when their help is needed more than ever.
“We are stuck, without cash and without the ability to get what we have in our warehouse
,” said Boby Sander, the organization's director in Haiti.
"It's catastrophic."
Food for the Hungry operates a cash-based program that helps about 25,000 families a year, Sander explained, adding that continued looting and attacks on banking institutions have paralyzed the system.
“Since February 29, we have not been able to do anything,” he said.
On a recent morning, the smell of cooking rice drew a group of adults and teenagers to a sidewalk near the building where aid workers were preparing food to be distributed to shelters in other parts of the city.
“Can you help me get a plate of food?
Today we have not eaten anything,” they asked those who entered and left the property.
But his prayers went unanswered.
The food was for the shelter set up at the school.
“We know it's not much,” said Jean Emmanuel Joseph, responsible for food distribution at the Center for Peasant Organization and Community Action.
“It's a shame we don't have the chance to give them more.”
At the shelter, some adults and children tried to get back in line for a second helping.
The response was: “You have already eaten a plate (...) Let others receive one.”
One of the residents, Jethro Antoine, 55, explained that the food was only for those staying in the compound but that there was little to be done against outsiders who sneak in.
“If you go and complain you will become the enemy, they might kill you for that,” he added.
[USA. allocates millionaire funds to try to return peace to Haiti]
According to the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, some 5.5 million Haitians – almost half of the population – need humanitarian aid, and it promised 25 million dollars in addition to the 33 million announced earlier in the week.
Bauer indicated that this year less than 3% of the humanitarian aid requested for the country has been financed and pointed out that the World Food Program needs 95 million dollars in the next six months.
“In Haiti, conflict and hunger go hand in hand,” he said.
“It scares me where we are going.”