Aid distribution in Haiti can be hit-and-miss

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - "If you can''t fight you can''t get anything," said a petite 19-year-old Haitian named Darling who missed the bags of rice and bottles of cooking oil handed out at a crowded earthquake survivors'' camp in Port-au-Prince.

She was one of some 15,000 survivors of the January 12 quake who lined up at a camp in the shattered Delmas neighborhood over the weekend to receive rice and cooking oil given by aid workers to every fourth person in the line.

Aid agency Plan International''s idea was that the Haitians would divide up the rice, or barter it for other supplies.

But for many in the makeshift camp -- one of around 400 such sprawling settlements that carpet open spaces in the wrecked Haitian capital -- it didn''t work out that way.

"The majority of the people did not find anything," one survivor said. "There was no sharing," another said.

As aid slowly finds its way to Haiti''s several million desperate quake victims, the U.S. government and military, United Nations and international relief groups have created almost as many different ways to distribute food as there are improvised survivors'' camps in Port-au-Prince.

In Cite Soleil, a gang-ridden slum of 400,000 in Port-au-Prince, residents queued patiently along several blocks at dawn on Sunday to receive small but varied bags of aid from U.S. military and Brazilian "blue helmets" - U.N. troops.

Children smiled at soldiers handing out packets of cookies, and adults took grocery bags of rice, beans, pasta, salmon and other goods.

Lieutenant General Ken Keen, head of the U.S. relief effort in Haiti, said at the food distribution point that the 10 truck loads of aid would not be enough.

"You cannot feed every citizen every day," Keen said. He said the aid operation would start giving each family two weeks'' worth of food at a time and he hoped this would be working next week.

SCRUMS FOR FOOD, SHOTS FIRED

Even with U.S. and U.N. troops and Haitian police standing guard, earthquake survivors at the camp in the shattered Delmas neighborhood scrummed for bags of rice dropped from the back of a dump truck on Saturday. Shots were fired into the air by authorities and alarmed aid workers briefly stopped the delivery until they had managed to bring the group to order.