In Haiti's Hardest-Hit Neighborhoods, Resilience

Here in the capital's poorest neighborhoods, where the earthquake hit the hardest and caused the most damage, life has settled into a kind of shell-shocked reality. Life was a hard struggle for survival here before the Jan. 12 earthquake. It is infinitely harder now.

Rubble from collapsed building spills into the streets. Electric wires dangle uselessly from crooked poles, concrete walls and roofs slump onto crushed cars and the scent of death wafts down narrow potholed streets thick with aimless pedestrians.

There is little power, few jobs. There are still people trapped alive in the rubble; one rescue team reported on Sunday getting text messages from beneath the wreckage. Hundreds of critically injured people are awaiting treatment or evacuation.

Some street markets offer oranges, onions, cabbages and bananas, for those with cash. But for many, finding enough food is a daily preoccupation. Students show up to a school with no teachers and a precariously cracked concrete building. Where there is space, people have set up impromptu tent cities, with colorful shelters ranging from fancy camping tents to cardboard lean-tos all leaning against each other.

Into this grim environment came paratroopers of the 82^nd Airborne's 2^nd Brigade, in a convoy of three huge cargo trucks and Humvees and carrying 300 packs of high-protein food, 240 bottles of water and 320 small portable radios. Staff Sgt. George DeMayo, his face sunburned bright red, had a plan: when the trucks pulled up to the curb, his men would fan out to form a perimeter to keep people away from the trucks. Then DeMayo would find a couple of English-speaking Haitians from the crowd and have them form the crowd into orderly lines.

"Don't forget to sling your weapons on your backs," DeMayo ordered his men. Normally, they carry their weapons slung on their chests, ready to bring into firing position. But on this humanitarian mission, DeMayo said, the message is: We're only here to help.

DeMayo's platoon, part of Alpha Company, 2^nd Battalion, 325^th Airborne Infantry Regiment, is part of a brigade that soon will have 3,000 paratroopers on the ground in Port-au-Prince. The 2^nd Brigade Combat Team has spread its troops out around the city in five major camps and numerous smaller outposts, on a mission focused on delivering food and water flown in by the United Nations World Food Program.

The brigade also has set up a medical treatment center and conducts roving medical patrols through camps where the homeless have gathered. They are helping evacuate badly injured Haitians out to the U.S. Navy hospital ship, the USNS Comfort, anchored just offshore. The paratroopers soon will begin helping remove rubble. "This is blue collar stuff," brigade commander, Col. Chris Gibson, told me in the tent he uses as a tactical operations center. "We have given this thing everything we have, every day."

Despite the evident misery on the streets, he said, "the Haitian people are just incredibly resilient." This resiliency was in evidence at Sunday's food distribution mission, where DeMayo's plan worked -- at first. He found three Haitians to organize a small crowd into a neat line, and the paratroopers began handing out the food packs, water and the radios.

But as word of the give-away raced down the street like a lit fuse, soon DeMayo's neat lines were thronged with hundreds of people -- maybe a thousand -- either waiting quietly, or singing and laughing and clapping in rhythms. Despite the enormous need, there was no pushing, no panic, no bullying, no street toughs waiting to grab the radios and water bottles clutched by solemn-faced young children

Within minutes, the hand-outs were gone and the paratroopers leapt back up on their trucks, which moved off slowly through the crowds, nosing through swarms of children and teens who ran alongside laughing and waving.

"America!" they chanted happily. "America! America!"