KUWAIT CITY, Jan 17, (Agencies):  Local institutions in Kuwait have started conducting relief operations for Haiti earthquake victims.  Some have collected donations, while others are organizing various charitable events to help the victims.
In a press statement Sunday, KEO International Consultants revealed its employees have pulled their resources together and collected over $64,000 for the victims of the earthquake which struck Haiti recently.
KEO is a regional architecture, engineering and construction management firm with offices in many Arabian Gulf cities.
On Jan 14, a directive from KEO’s management started with a donation e-mail for what was expected to be a small donation towards the relief efforts, but by mid-day Thursday, the collection totaled over $40,000. 
Corporate Human Resources and Administration Deputy Director at KEO Alyssa Sultan said, “Employees really made a huge effort and reached deep into their pockets.  When the initial message went out for the collection, I was a bit overwhelmed with the amount of responses, probably more than a donation every 30 seconds.”
Within four days since the campaign started, the firm with its branches in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain had pulled together a total of $64,409.52.  Sultan affirmed “the money will be forwarded to the Unicef and International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies by mid-week.  KEO has always had a family atmosphere and this campaign really represents what we are all about — helping those in need.”
Meanwhile, telecommunications giant and subsidiary of Kuwait-based Zain Group — Zain Jordan — announced Saturday its plan to provide free services to Jordanian peacekeepers in Haiti and their families at home.  Exemption has also been applied to all customer calls to Haiti as of Sunday and for a week’s period, while calls made the week before will be fully reimbursed.
According to Jordan CEO Abdulmalik Al-Jaber, the initiative is in line with the company’s commitment to social responsibility.  He added the company had made sure that the technical staff, immediately after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, focused on finding innovative solutions to facilitate communication between Jordanian peacekeeping troops and their families back home.
Moreover, the English School Fahaheel will hold a special non-uniform day on Jan 21 to raise funds for the earthquake victims, in coordination with the United Nations Haiti Earthquake Appeal.  Separate donations will also be accepted on this day.
Rescuers pulled three survivors from the rubble Sunday five days after the Haiti earthquake, but tensions were growing among a desperate population as police opened fire on looters, killing one man.
After hours of painstaking digging through the ruins, a team from Florida unearthed a seven-year-old girl, a man aged 34 and a 50-year-old woman in the ruins of a store as dawn broke in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
Later hundreds of rioters ransacked Hyppolite market in the heart of the devastated city as survivors besieged hospitals and make-shift field clinics, some carrying the injured on their backs or on carts.
Police reinforcements descended on the market armed with shotguns and assault rifles and one rioter, a man in his 30s, was fatally shot in the head, an AFP photographer said.
The church bells lay eerily silent Sunday over the ruined Haitian capital, but the faithful still came in droves praying for solace in the darkest hour of this deeply-religious nation.
“I want to send a message of hope because God is still with us even in the depths of this tragedy, and life is not over,” said father Henry Marie Landasse as he prepared for Mass at the main cathedral.
Only the facade of the once proud building stood over the ruins around it, felled by the powerful 7.0-magnitude quake which struck on Tuesday.
Arriving in Haiti to survey the destruction for himself, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the quake was the worst humanitarian crisis to face the world body in decades.
Battling emotional and physical fatigue, rescue teams continued their grim task in the knowledge that the likelihood of finding more survivors was fading with every passing hour.
The US general running the military relief effort vowed to redouble efforts after 70,000 bottles of water and 130,000 food rations were distributed on Saturday.
Asked about toll estimates as high as 200,000, Lieutenant General Ken Keen said no one could know for sure but such figures were a “starting point” and the international community feared the worst.
Between 20,000 and 30,000 people died just in the town of Leogane, west of the capital, according to UN officials. The Haitian government has estimated about 50,000 dead so far across the country.
“Clearly, this is a disaster of epic proportions, and we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” Keen said.
Water purification units that can process 100,000 liters (26,417 gallons) of clean water per day were being rushed to the scene as the US worked to open badly damaged ports needed to deliver vital fuel and supplies.
The US military has been relying mainly on helicopters deployed from the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier.
The Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) aid group said that when it opened an emergency hospital at Carrefour, a poor district near Leogane on Saturday, crowds arrived almost immediately.
“Patients arrived on handcarts or on men’s backs,” said MSF emergency coordinator Hans van Dillen.
“There are other hospitals in the area, but they are already unable to cope with the number of injured and have limited resources of personnel and medicines and equipment.”
MSF said their doctors and surgeons had been working around the clock, amputating limbs and performing caesarian sections on pregnant women.
Another French aid group, Medecins du Monde, said it would have to amputate hundreds of people whose limbs had been crushed in the earthquake even though its doctors had no electricity to work by.
Most bodies were being dumped into mass graves outside the capital to prevent the spread of disease.
Some 43 international teams comprising 1,739 rescue workers and 161 dogs have already scoured 60 percent of the worst affected areas hit by the quake. About 10,000 American troops are being sent to assist and secure the stricken areas and should all be in place by Monday.
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told AFP that 12 more people were pulled out alive from debris on Saturday, taking the total to more than 70 since the teams started working.
“We don’t give up hope to find more survivors,” stressed Byrs. “The morale of the rescue team is very high despite the hardship.”
Byrs said the way buildings had collapsed left “sufficient void spaces that allow for trapped victims to remain alive.
“There is still hope. The conditions are very favorable. It’s exceptional and thank God for that,” she said.
But Rami Peltz, a rescuer with an Israeli team, said: “Today is the last day that I think we will be able to find survivors, mainly because of dehydration.”
Food
World leaders have stepped up to pledge aid to rebuild a devastated Haiti, but on the streets of its wrecked capital quake survivors were still waiting on Sunday for the basics: food, water and medicine.
Hundreds of thousands of hungry Haitians were desperately waiting for help, but logistical logjams kept major relief from reaching most victims, many of them sheltering in makeshift camps on streets strewn with debris and decomposing bodies.
In the widespread absence of authority, looters swarmed over collapsed stores on the city’s shattered main commercial boulevard, carrying off T-shirts, bags, toys and anything else they could find. Fighting broke out between groups of looters carrying knives, ice-picks, hammers and rocks.
Many Haitians streamed out of the city on foot with suitcases on their heads or jammed in cars to find food and shelter in the countryside, and flee aftershocks and violence.
Many others crowded the airport hoping to get on planes that left packed with Haitians.
President Barack Obama promised help as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flew to Haiti, where the shell-shocked government gave the United States control over the congested main airport to guide aid flights from around the world.
“We’re moving forward with one of the largest relief efforts in our history to save lives and deliver relief that averts an even larger catastrophe,” said Obama, flanked at the White House by predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who will lead a charity drive to help Haiti.
But on the streets of Port-au-Prince, where scarce police patrols fired occasional shots and tear gas to try to disperse looters, the distribution of aid appeared random, chaotic and minimal. Downtown, young men could be seen carrying pistols.
There were jostling scrums for food and water as U.S. military helicopters swooped down to throw out boxes of water bottles and rations. A reporter also saw foreign aid workers tossing packets of food to desperate Haitians.
“The distribution is totally disorganized. They are not identifying the people who need the water. The sick and the old have no chance,” said Estime Pierre Deny, standing at the back of a crowd looking for water with his empty plastic container.
Politics
Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton say the earthquake in Haiti offers a chance to put aside politics and help people in despair.
Bush and Clinton appeared on five Sunday television talk shows as part of their effort to lead private fundraising efforts for Haitian relief, including immediate needs and the long-term rebuilding effort. President Barack Obama asked them to lead the bipartisan effort.
“I’d say now is not the time to focus on politics,” Bush said in an interview taped Saturday after the ex-presidents’ visit to the White House. “You’ve got people who are ... children who’ve lost parents. People wondering where they’re going to be able to drink water,” Bush said. “There’s a great sense of desperation. And so my attention is on trying to help people deal with the desperation.”
Bush said that he doesn’t know what critics are talking about when they claim Obama is trying to score political points with a broad response to Haiti’s woes. The most vocal critic has been conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh who urged people not to donate and said he wouldn’t trust that money donated to Haiti through the White House Web site would go to the relief efforts. He said people contribute enough by paying income taxes.
“I just think it doesn’t do us any good to waste any time in what is in my opinion a fruitless and pointless conversation,” Clinton said.
He added: “In a disaster of this magnitude there’s no way that the government, which has other responsibilities as well, national security and other responsibilities — you just can’t deal with this just with government money.”
Clinton said a disaster like the earthquake in Haiti “reminds us of our common humanity. It reminds us of needs that go beyond fleeting disagreements.” He said political debate is healthy in normal times, but it would be perverse in a time of disaster to let politics get in the way of helping.
China
China said Sunday the bodies of eight nationals buried in Haiti’s devastating earthquake had been found as the Asian nation’s first batch of humanitarian aid arrived in the Caribbean nation.
China’s Ministry of Public Security said in a statement the victims were members of the country’s police force. But a more detailed report by the official Xinhua news agency said some were peacekeepers.
Xinhua said four of the victims were part of the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti and the other four were members of a team sent to Port-au-Prince by the public security ministry for “peacekeeping consultations”.
The team had just arrived in Haiti and was meeting UN officials when the quake struck, the report said.
China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said Thursday all other Chinese in Haiti were safe, including more than 130 UN peacekeepers.
“The bodies of the eight dead comrades will be repatriated back to China as soon as possible,” the ministry said.
EU
European Union nations expect to announce Monday aid contributions to help rebuild quake-struck Haiti and call for an international conference to back the effort, according to EU officials.
“We’re going to show our willingness to work on the immediate needs of the country but also on future reconstruction,” the spokeswoman for the EU’s Spanish presidency said Sunday, on the eve of emergency talks in Brussels.
Ministers responsible for development issues will meet in Brussels with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton for around two hours of talks on the quake, which is thought to have killed more than 50,000 people.
Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos will also take part.
The ministers will examine the efforts by the 27 nations to help provide aid — some 20-30 million euros in initial funds have been sent from Europe — and discuss the reconstruction process that will follow.
According to an initial EU damage assessment, more than 4,000 physical structures were destroyed or damaged in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince by the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck on Tuesday.
Some 250,000 people were hurt, and 1.5 million are without shelter.
The emergency talks in Brussels are expected to finalise a first reconstruction aid package for the longer term, with funds from both the EU budget and the member nations.
“The European Commission is working to redirect some of the development funds for Haiti,” to fill the first tranche, an EU official said.
An EU diplomat said: “We hope that the European states will also provide their first indication of how much they will be willing to give.”