PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Four days into a new food distribution program from the United Nations that aims to repair a faltering aid effort, paper coupons that can be redeemed for 55 pounds of rice have become more valuable than Haitian money.
Women hide them away in their bosoms. Aid workers count them furtively in the back of SUVs. The government wants control over who gets them, while schemers have already created counterfeits.
The food coupons are akin to diamonds: They are precious because sustenance is scarce. For three weeks since the Jan. 12 earthquake, the international effort to feed millions of Haitians has been dogged by confusion, transportation snags, security problems and a lack of coordination. Before the coupon program started Saturday, food giveaways had become a Darwinian sport - with biscuits and bottles of canola oil or biscuits thrown like footballs from the backs of trucks to masses of men jockeying for position.
Many are still hungry. As of Sunday, 639,200 people had received a meal from the United Nations' World Food Program, 32 percent of the 2 million estimated to be in need.
Aid groups say that they have been knocked back on their heels by a catastrophe they describe as more difficult to manage than famine in Africa or the tsunami in Asia.
Rarely if ever, they say, has a natural disaster so ravaged the crowded capital of an already poor country, devastating both the government and the international agencies that usually step in.
And yet the food crisis is not simply a natural disaster. Interviews with aid groups, U.N. officials, experts and Haitian government leaders reveal that communication was not a top priority early on. Inexperience and a go-it-alone approach - by groups Haitian and foreign - contributed to the dysfunction.
Who's got the map?
In many ways, the new food distribution program is an improvement, with its stepped-up security, emphasis on women as recipients and its plan for 16 fixed locations. But the disorientation that immediately followed the earthquake has been especially hard to cure.
Two weeks after the quake, in a khaki tent on the U.N. campus in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's interior minister led a meeting of bleary-eyed officials from the government, the United Nations and a half-dozen other agencies assigned to such issues as food, water and shelter.
Almost immediately, confusion surfaced: They were not working from a common map.
Several people at the meeting complained that they were not getting reports fast enough from organizations on the streets to help keep an accurate tally of which areas were getting assistance.
Numbers were tossed about, all of them adding up to staggering challenges. The shelter cluster reported that it had only 4,000 of the 200,000 tents requested by Haitian authorities. Food rations - a basic meal - had been distributed to less than half of the people the government believed needed them. And while potable water was reaching about 500,000 a day, only 20,000 had been given access to latrines.
"How do you provide toilets to makeshift camps," Guido Canale of UNICEF said in an interview after the meeting, "in a city that did not have sufficient sanitation to begin with?"
The meeting revealed how aid groups were struggling with an unexpected development: In a country where many of them had worked for years, they were starting from scratch. Sophie Perez, the country director for CARE, for example, said that 80 percent of her 133 employees had lost their homes to the quake.
The government, weak in the best of times, was incapacitated, and three of four U.N. warehouses with stockpiles of rice and other staples had been damaged. Food, more than anything else, became the pressure point. Haitian officials pushed to get off the sidelines; aid groups, fearing rampant corruption and violence, sought to limit their role.
Leaving hungry
At the most visible food distribution site in the capital, near the collapsed presidential palace, the line typically lasted hours, with a swell of hungry Haitians leaving empty-handed.
After several days of trucks coming and leaving without serving the entire group, chaos engulfed the process.
Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the World Food Program, said that around 60 police officers and U.N. troops usually managed security at locations where as many as 5,000 people crowded around trucks with food. On at least two days last week, U.N. troops used tear gas after a mass of men rushed the food distribution point and began grabbing what they could. In a separate case, one World Food Program truck stuck in traffic was robbed by men on motorbikes.
Violence was more the exception than the rule, but food was still given out first come first served. A truck would drive up and men would run toward it. After awhile, women and those who lived a few blocks away did not even bother.
"They are treating people like dogs, just tossing things at them," said Sejour Jean Rodrigue, 38, one of the leaders in Delmas 1. "We don't want anything to do with it."
The new system for food distribution, devised to address these problems, has two major changes: coupons and a focus on women, who are supposed to be the only ones collecting rice.
The process also shifts power from Haiti's government to foreign aid groups; and from men throwing food from trucks to local leaders giving out coupons, like Rigaud Joachin, 48, a gregarious bookkeeper with the national telecommunications company who lives in one of the few houses still standing in the neighborhood of Nazon.
He was responsible on Sunday night for handing out 300 coupons to a list of families, and he took his job seriously. Inside his porch at dusk, he bellowed for each person to come forward.
"Lafleur Fernande!"
"Renette Briole!"
Before long, the crowd was 15 people wide and 3 deep. But Joachin, a respected neighborhood figure, had little trouble keeping order.
The next day, his 300 coupon holders and hundreds of others lined Poupelard Street, as two women at a time walked away with sacks of rice.
Other locations have had a harder time. Security has been stepped up for food distribution, but twice since Saturday, Haitians have set up blockades to try to stop U.N. supply trucks from passing, and pressure on coupon holders has intensified.
At a park in the wealthy suburb of Petionville that day, the food arrived late, after thousands without coupons had already gathered.
The biggest problem was the location: the driveway of a police station that was wide open, with no natural entrance or exit. Aid workers and U.N. troops set up a perimeter with plastic fencing, and the area where people left with rice felt as chaotic and aggressive as the food lines before the new program had started.
Meanwhile, theft occurred almost openly. Partly because workers were trying to move quickly - letting men, not just women, pick up the rice - pairs of off-duty police officers slid in to collect what they had no right to take.
Many people nonetheless left pleased. Bernadette Volcy, 54, said she was "so happy the Americans are helping us." But, she added, "it's not enough."
U.N. officials agree. As of Tuesday morning, the new program had handed out enough rice to feed about 212,000 people, according to U.N. figures - more than 100,000 people short of its initial goal.
Hundreds of thousands of people are still waiting. When the empty trucks left Petionville, Haitians from the camp walked around looking for another gathering, holding up small strips of paper with their names written in careful script.
Desperate, hungry and still not satisfied, they said they were looking for the men in control of food distribution. They needed to eat.
