Tue, 19 Jan 2010 9:18a.m.
By Mike McRoberts
Filed Monday 18 January
We've seen plenty of the frustration from those earthquake victims in Haiti still waiting on essential aid. Over the past 24 hours I've seen another side to this, the frustration of families desperately trying to get into Haiti to search for loved ones and grieve with survivors.
The airport at Port au Prince is open only to aid flights and that means civilian travel is by road. We started out with a couple of Haitian families in Miami yesterday flying to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, by the time we arrived yesterday we were too late to cross the border so stayed overnight and caught a bus this morning. They could have sold the bus seats 3 or 4 times over and we were very lucky to get on board.
It was certainly an emotional journey. Most of the time the bus was in silence and you could feel the tension as the passengers contemplated what they might find when they got there. It took for ever, about four or five hours to get to the border and then another wait of a couple of hours as we went through customs and passport control. It was dusk before we got into Haiti and all of us were concerned about being left in the dark at the other end.
As we got nearer the city we started to see for ourselves the images that have dominated the world's news for the past few days. Buildings smashed and twisted out of shape, roads filled with people roaming with nowhere to go. At one point I saw two bodies lying on the footpath, like someone had just taken out the trash.
We took a taxi to our live cross point after leaving the bus. The driver didn't want to stop and film anything in the dark, everyone seems terrified of the security situation here, which is going to make working and moving around quite a challenge.
We won't finish till midnight but we've managed to find a place to stay. In a city where there are no hotels left and families are camping on the sides of streets, one of the people we travelled with today has a brother who's said we can sleep on his back porch. There are now three families living in the home.
The old adage of "everything looks better in the morning" seems unlikely to apply in Port au Prince.
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Pictures courtesy of Reuters