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The Bob Corbett Haiti listserve warns that it is “a very active place...this is not a list for the faint-hearted and there is no digest version.”

It is, however, a preeminient source of current information about Haiti, in English, and the last 50 hours have lived up to its disclaimer.

Gleaned from the list...

Richard Morse, proprietor of the famous Hotel Oloffson and founder of the band, RAM, is tweeting.

Conversely, according to a woman at CHF International, an aid organization out of Maryland, President Preval and other leadership have little or no access to phones, as of 2 p.m. Thursday. “We just got off the phone with the Haitian Ambassador to the UN, and they are in an urgent need of 5 satellite phones for the President, Prime Minster, Minister for the Interior the Chief of Police and the Haitian Ambassador to the UN. The communication is severely limited and their ability to talk to each other as well as the US and other coordinating agencies is compromised,” she reports.

Someone at the UN base writes that,

“the UN base is supposedly currently out of water and rations, and the police forces which are stationed here, along with the rest of the UN foreign staff, mostly europeans, sit and smoke cigarettes and suck their teeth at the fact that the Caribbean Market and hotel montana have completely been demolished, nevermind the singing, crying, and praying haitians outside.”

I think of lines I wrote this fall.

...When A– and I visit the Hotel Montana, Port-au-Prince’s swankiest hotel, which overlooks antennae-spiked mansions and a private golf course, the pillows in the lobby are being measured for new silk cases.

...Slightly downhill, 1,000 mattresses lie inside the newly-constructed emergency shelter, accessible by a frighteningly steep road. (Hypothetically, the paved hill was intended for vehicle traffic. Our host laughs at the man who did the work; we walk sideways down the incline. To visit Haiti is to recall America, to suddenly notice the ordered significance of construction codes and waste collection schedules.)