Please pray for Haiti

CNN- Haitians awoke Wednesday to a landscape of destruction left by the most violent earthquake to hit the island nation in two centuries. While there was no clear estimate of the dead and wounded as dawn broke Wednesday, the U.S. State Department had been told to expect a profound loss of life. The United States and global humanitarian agencies said they would to begin administering aid on Wednesday amid fears that impoverished Haiti, already gripped by human misery, was facing nothing short of a catastrophe.

The Haitian ambassador to the United States said the country's first lady is saying that "most of Port-au-Prince is destroyed." Raymond Joseph said she passed on that information to Haiti's consul general in Miami. "The only thing I can do now is pray and hope for the best," Joseph told CNN on Tuesday night, shortly after the 7.0-magnitude quake.

The International Federation of the Red Cross estimated that 3 million people were affected by the earthquake. "This is obviously a tremendous tragedy that happened just before sundown last night," Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told CNN on Wednesday. "Our teams have been working in a coordinated and aggressive way all night to make sure the U.S. mounts an effective response in supporting saving lives, which is the president's absolute top priority for this first period of 72 hours when we search and save as many lives as we can."

Three Jordanian peacekeepers died and an additional 21 were injured, according to the state-run Petra News Agency. Limited communications hampered reporting of casualties and destruction. But the quake had reportedly brought down The Hotel Montana, popular with foreigners visiting Port-au-Prince. French Minister of Cooperation Alain Joyandet expressed concern Wednesday for the approximately 200 French tourists staying there.

Wounded people, white with dust, filled the streets. Women clutched their babies, desperate to find help. Others stretched their arms skyward, calling out Jesus' name.
Communication with people in Haiti was, at best, sketchy and achieved mainly through social networking sites such as Twitter and YouTube and via Internet phone. Everybody is camping in the streets of Port-au-Prince sleeping under the stars to wake up from an awful nightmare," photographer Frederic Dupoux wrote in a Twitter post early Wednesday.

"It's really ugly, just like in a bad dream," he had written earlier. "People need help, get out and help!" With darkness, an uneasy quiet descended.

"The singing and praying I was hearing earlier has died down," Richard Morse, hotel manager at the Oloffson Hotel in Port-au-Prince, wrote in a Twitter post. "No helicopters. No sound of ambulances. ... When my batteries die, I will no longer be able to communicate. Looks like it's going to be a long night."

Several witnesses reported heavy damage and bodies in the streets of the congested capital, where concrete-block homes line the steep hillsides leading inland from the city's waterfront. Yvonne Trimble, who has worked as a missionary in Haiti for more than 30 years, said the quake rattled the walls of her three-story home. She sat frozen in her chair as glasses crashed to the floor from her china cabinet, she said in a post to iReport, the CNN Web site that allows people to submit pictures and videos.

"I have been a missionary since 1975 and have been through coup d'états, revolution, civil war and never been so terrified in my life," she said.

American Airlines Flight 1908 took off from Port-au-Prince shortly after the quake with a fraction of its passengers, many people choosing to stay behind. Those who arrived in Miami, Florida, on Tuesday night described fellow passengers as being in a state of shock and an airport that was badly "cracked up."

However, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the U.S. Embassy reported that the airport was in good enough shape for the United States to start sending teams and assistance Wednesday. "We have some assets ready to go," Crowley said.

The U.N. World Food Programme also planned to send a plane with 87 metric tons of high-energy biscuits, said spokeswoman Bettina Luescher in New York. That's enough to feed 30,000 people for a week. Mike Godfrey, an American contractor working for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said "a huge plume of dust and smoke rose up over the city" within minutes of the quake -- "a blanket that completely covered the city and obscured it for about 20 minutes until the atmosphere dissipated the dust."

Please please please keep our brothers and sisters in your prayers. I know way to many Haitians to sleep on this...even if it's $5.00 please send in aid.