Global Voices has sent a two-person team to Port-au-Prince in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, to help support citizen media activity. Georgia Popplewell and Alice Backer are also contributing firsthand reporting to our coverage of recovery efforts. Find out more about their assignment here. PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, 27 January, 2010 We went into downtown Port-au-Prince again yesterday. We'd heard via Twitter that food was being distributed near the National Palace, followed by reports, from Carel Pedre and Karl Jean-Jeune, of UN security “spraying gas” and “throwing tear gas”. Examining the footage posted to YouTube by Carel Pedre, my Global Voices colleague Marc Herman concluded that the substance being sprayed looked more like pepper spray. The pepper spray story was corroborated by reports from the UK Times Online and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, though Al Jazeera English maintains the tear gas line. Whether pepper-spray or tear-gas-related, the scuffle has died down by the time we arrive in town. The line is long, but people are waiting patiently. We ask a bystander what’s being distributed. He says he thinks it’s rice. I ask Roosevelt, our driver, to circle the Champs de Mars for a bit, so we can see what’s going on in the vast tent city that now occupies most of the city’s central square. Unsurprisingly, the regular rhythm of Haitian life seems to have established itself in the maze of makeshift shelters clustered among plinths bearing statues of Toussaint, Pétion and company, the country’s founding fathers. Women are cooking, bathing babies and doing laundry in basins along the perimeter wall, bathing themselves at the roadside. Children are playing football, vendors have set up stalls on the periphery. Near the National Palace, people have gathered to watch a safe being lowered from a government building. Less formal salvage and scavenging operations are taking place in other parts of the city as well. We pass groups of men shoveling rubble, people picking among the ruins of buildings for things they can reuse. Among the detritus, Port-au-Prince is slowly coming back to life. Last night a friend who's come here to work with a Canadian NGO wondered how many of the “displaced” were people whose homes were intact but who were simply afraid of sleeping indoors. Yesterday the Haitian government, such as it is, issued a bulletin summarising the impact of the earthquake. On her blog, Anne-Christine D'Adesky posts translations of some of the highlights: “Around 112,000 dead, 195,000 wounded, 1 million homeless, half the houses destroyed in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and Leogane; at least 23 private hospitals collapsed. “The government yesterday announced the creation of 2 camps for displaced persons in Port-au-Prince: one on the road to Tabarre, the other at Croix des Bouquets. Another site has been identified in the zone of Leogane. “Only qualified engineers can determine if a damaged building is sound enough to be recoccupied. The rule to follow until an engineer has evaluated a property is: if the building doesn't look sound, it isn't. “Today, we estimate the capacity of food distribution varies between 200,000 and 300,000 rations a day. This means that, in Port-au-Prince and its surroundings alone, over 800,000 people will not be reached. This is the major challenge. “The government is opposed to precipitous adoptions and uncontrolled departures from Haiti of vulnerable or orphaned children and is concerned about the risk of trafficking. “NGOs engaged in humanitarian or food aid are encouraged to work with the UN system that has been established.” It’s hard to know what’s really happening on the ground. Port-au-Prince is a vast and unfamiliar city, and my primary goal in being here is not to report on the situation. We’re staying in Pétionville, away from the fray. As the tear gas story above demonstrates, it’s difficult to verify information. You try to get around as much as you can, but in the end you’ll see only a tiny fraction of the whole, and perhaps understand or read accurately only a fraction of that. But the overriding story is about the distribution of aid: how badly it’s going, how supplies are failing to get to those who need it, and also how difficult the whole exercise is. I'm pretty sure that one is true. On the edge of the tent city near the National Palace I talk to a pair of middle-aged women from Bel Air. They say they haven’t received any food supplies. I ask them if they plan on leaving the city for the countryside. The older one says no. I ask why. She says it’s because her father is dead — she has no family left “en province“. We drive out west to the bedroom district of Carrefour, where 40 to 50% of the buildings are said to have sustained damage.