Haitian Women, Eldlerly Line Up for Food in Port-au-Prince

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Feb. 1) – Long before sunrise today, about a thousand people were lined up on a grassy patch where cows grazed north of the U.S. Embassy, clutching tickets that would allow them to collect two weeks worth of rice.

A United Nations program to distribute 1 million meals a day over the course of two weeks left relief workers scrambling to produce and distribute tickets among the most desperate of Port-au-Prince.

For the next two weeks, the World Food Program is distributing 50 pounds of rice to 1,700 people at 15 sites around Port-au-Prince. The ticketless will be turned away.

"People weren't getting food fast enough," said Shannon Oliver, who works with Catholic Relief Services, a Baltimore relief group.

The tickets were given to "the most vulnerable," Oliver said. Those include women orphaned, widowed or injured by the Jan. 12 earthquake; the elderly and pregnant women; and those yet to receive a donated tent and whose shelters were fashioned from cinder block and bedsheets.

Miguel Filsaime, among the few men in line, struggled with his load of rice. Because his wife's name was on the ticket and not his own, Filsaime, 34, was initially turned away.

"Please – my wife is six months pregnant. The sun is hot. She could not carry this," he said in English.

Still, pregnant and elderly women sauntered down the road, the heavy bags balanced tenuously on their heads.

The women are prone to robbery by gangs of men, said U.S. Army Capt. Sam Torres, whose 133 troops provided security at the site near the embassy. "Once they leave our view, they become targets," he said.

The U.N. body has so far provided food to around 650,000 Haitians in the 18 days after the devastating earthquake killed an estimated 200,000 and destroyed most of the country's infrastructure, including food supply.

Feeding an entire city of millions of people is unusual for the World Food Program, which is more used to providing food to refugees displaced by conflicts and wars.