Horror stories from Haiti

Chickens peck at corpses on the street as we follow the grave diggers through Haiti's finest cemetery.

A stream of red bodily fluid leads us to a drop-off point, where a dozen more bodies have just been dumped by poor families who could never normally afford a burial in the Cimetiere de Port-au-Prince.

Unwilling to touch the corpses after days under one of the city's 10,000 rubble piles, the undertakers - who have neither gloves nor face masks - tie a blanket around an ankle, and drag each body over the concrete into littered pits beneath the tombs.

Back in the square outside the graveyard - a block from the ruined presidential palace - hundreds of survivors watch the flow of bodies from the shade of trees opposite a row of collapsed shops.

Here, two men tell The Times a remarkable tale: they have just rescued an 83-year-old man, prominent lawyer Herby Kedo, who was trapped when his house collapsed in the earthquake that struck the city six days ago.

Ralph Nicholas, a bodyguard, says: "This engineer guy in my area asked us to get the bodies of his parents out. We broke through the roof with picks and a sledgehammer, and we found his mother's body pretty quick in the bedroom. Then we heard this voice from what I guess was the living room, saying something like 'It hurts; stop banging - I'm alive' - it was a total miracle."

Just then Herby Kedo Jnr arrives in a rush, only to find he's missed his mother's burial.

"You could say I had to do something even more important - I've just taken my dad to the Red Cross hospital; he's doing okay," he says. "All those days, he was under there alive - how could we have guessed it was possible?"

Kedo Jnr says when his sister pulled his father toward the front door after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake began last Tuesday, he shouted "Not without my wife!" and ran back inside, moments before the family's home collapsed.

"The first words he said when we got him out were: 'Where is my Maria?' He has wounds in his head and his foot and he is very weak ... but otherwise he's okay - but only because my neighbours did this dangerous thing and helped me. We get no help from the government or no one."

Down the road, at the general hospital, hundreds of patients lie on filthy triage mattresses in the quadrangle between the quake-damaged hospital buildings.

Meghan Balzer, 26, a Haitian teacher volunteering for the Red Cross, says: "In the first few days we used toilet paper for bandages. The bodies have lined the streets all around here; just truck after truck . But the real problem is doctors - where are all the foreign doctors? We are doing this ourselves."

Everywhere in Port-au-Prince, we hear the same bitter complaint from Haitians: that the UN, Haitian government and more than two dozen foreign rescue units have done nothing to help them.

In a six-hour tour of downtown Port-au-Prince, we see only two rescue efforts in progress.

A weary-looking two-man assessment team from SA Rescue walks along the rubble-strewn Rue de Sans Fil. One member of the team says: "Its tough. Man, its tough".

The other is at the three-storey tax and customs building where, an official says, people trapped behind a sloping wall of collapsed concrete have been sending text messages to say they are alive.

A crowd gathers as a mechanical pile-driver plunges its prong into what used to be the roof. Anyone trapped beneath a spot attacked by the machine will be skewered.

Behind us - in the crowded square in front of the presidential palace - we see UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon talking to reporters, and dozens of UN soldiers separating him from a tented camp which has sprung up since the quake.

A block away from the cameras, though, the Haitians are on their own.

Here, accidentally, I almost step on a small, carefully manicured hand sticking out from under yet another collapsed roof slab.

Getting down on my haunches, I discover that the woman with the pink nail polish was the passenger in a blue Suzuki Sidekick. It appears she was trying to escape the car via the driver's side when the building flattened her and the car.

Three metres away, the front half of a mangled bicycle stick out from beneath the concrete.

Sure enough, the body of the cyclist is under the same slab.

There is no sign that anyone has even assessed this building.

From the side, I can see deep into metre-high, wedge-shaped spaces of what used to be two of the building's three storeys. Here, I see a mangled double bunk; a garish child's comb; a musical score; a crushed wheelchair. My guide, Jean Dube, says: "This was the St Vincent School for the Handicapped. I do not think any got out."

I reach back beneath the slab and retrieve a sheaf of hand-written letters among the clutter. One - apparently to a benefactor - begins: "Dear friend Jessica. I thank you for all the things you send for me. I have nothing to send for you, but hope there is a time still. I love you with all my heart."

I call out - "Hello?" - and then feel foolish and leave.

A column of black smoke rises above the shattered buildings, and we instinctively head for it.

Sometimes clambering over rubble half-a-metre high on the street; once skirting a prison car pinned to the ground; we reach the bonfire at a street corner near the utterly flattened St Lewis High School. Two young men are throwing wooden palettes, tyre tubes and old tables onto the pyre.

One, Dominique Jerry, whose brother died in the quake, says simply: "There are the bodies of 12 teenagers in there. We have burned I think 30 that we found in the school this week. No one would come to collect the bodies we found, so we had to do it ourselves."

I take a surreal journey out of the city after sunset. The streets are pitch black and thousands of ghostly people simply lay their blankets on the street and lie down.

The lodge will allow me to sleep on the paving next to its swimming pool from tomorrow, but tonight I have the luxury of sharing a room with only three other journalists.

Then, for perhaps one second that feels like 10, the ground shakes and the air rumbles around me. Aftershock. I run outside; then notice a concrete walkway above my head, and head further out into the open, breathing hard.