Haiti's cabinet met on Sunday. On a bench and some plastic chairs in an open-air yard. Grieving for their own losses and those of a nation, the exhausted and overwhelmed officials sat in a circle on a concrete slab outside a police station, seeking to put some order into their response to a catastrophic earthquake.
Loosely-speaking, the United Nations is leading the relief effort, while the US military is in charge of air-traffic after Tuesday's disaster that Haitian officials say killed between 100,000-200,000 people.
But in line with diplomatic propriety, Haitian leaders are being consulted, and are giving approval, at every step. Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive led Sunday's cabinet meeting. President Rene Preval raised a hand of greeting to the team as he entered the police station that has become his home and office since the presidential palace partially collapsed.
Foreign ambassadors and heads of UN and other international agencies joined the ministers in what officials said would now be a twice-daily meeting to try to co-ordinate the world's rush to help Haiti. "They say the government is not fast, but we are doing our best," Information Minister Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue told a Reuters correspondent who simply pulled up a chair to listen in to the cabinet meeting.
"All the ministries have fallen down. Everything in Haiti is broken. There is not one person in this country without a friend or relative dead. The minister of finance lost his girl of 12. The minister of tourism lost his father and mother. The chief of police ... lost two of his three children."
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