Many people are still awaiting help days after the earthquake

By Matthew Price BBC News, Port-au-Prince

I was crouching by some rubble, talking to Jeanne-Charles, a pretty woman, composed and kind. She wasn't sure she could speak to me. "I'm very shaky," she explained. Still we did chat, and it all came out.

The night before, one of her colleagues at the Good Samaritan Mission of International Nursing, where Jeanne-Charles works, had received a text message.

It cannot be easy to mount a global rescue effort, especially in a place like Haiti. But surely it is not impossible to get people on the ground more quickly than they have arrived here

It was from one of her staff members, who when they sent it, was lying somewhere beneath the flattened mass of concrete that until last Tuesday was a five-storey building housing the mission.

The text message read: "There are 25 of us alive in here, we are hungry and hot."

In all, Jeanne-Charles told me, there were more than 200 people who had died in that building. That for days they'd been trying to get to the others who are trapped inside. A few had been brought out. But without equipment they could do little more.

As she struggled to keep her tears back, she gave me a list of everything they need - and they need everything. Bulldozers, diggers, medicine, doctors, food, water, shelter, money.

And then she asked me a simple question. "What can you do?"

Polite questions

It wasn't the first time in these gruelling days that I'd been asked such a question. There was the smart, polite, elderly man, for instance, who waited until I'd finished talking to someone else and then gently tapped me on the shoulder and told me his wife had died. "What will you do?" he asked.

Or the woman sitting with hundreds of others all huddled in a makeshift camp, who'd lost her family, her home, her possessions, her job, and yet who still managed to smile. "Do you have an umbrella," she wondered, "to keep the sun off?"

Residents remain trapped beneath tonnes of concrete

And then the gravedigger, who's been breaking the hard-baked earth with his pick and shovel since Day One at the city's overcrowded cemetery. He pointed at my facemask and asked if he might use it. I gave it to him, and smelt the rotting bodies.

It cannot be easy to mount a global rescue effort, especially in a place like Haiti. But surely it is not impossible to get people on the ground more quickly than they have arrived here.

Four days now, four days of pledges, of well-chosen words of concern for the people here, of promises, and yet still so little.

The airport is abuzz with activity. US military helicopters fly in and out, as do aid flights. There are now thousands of people on the ground desperate to help; some of the search teams have pulled people alive from the rubble; the aid is beginning to flow.

The UN is doing the best it can under difficult circumstances. It is also a victim. It has lost many personnel in the earthquake. As much as anyone, its people know what it means to have friends and loved ones trapped under a building.

But despite all this effort, it still feels as it there's not enough being done for Haiti.

Low expectations

I'm not sure though that the Haitians see it like that. I sense that they've grown used to expecting nothing.

I'm rather ashamed to tell you that I discovered that for myself today, first with a young man called Stanley, who's a waiter in the hotel we're in. He's been working with me from dawn to dusk, helping me do my job. Today I asked about his family.

When you promise a country that you will help it, help must arrive

It turns out Stanley's grandmother had been crushed to death under her house on Tuesday, pulled out of the rubble on Thursday, and buried on Friday. Stanley had been with me throughout and he hadn't said a thing.

Then there's Stanley's boss, the wonderful Cassandra. She runs the little hotel we're in and she's doing everything for us: given me Stanley, found us drivers, put her generator on when we need power, even as her fuel runs low. She's found rooms for everyone. And now I find out she has nowhere to live. Her home was also destroyed.

There's no doubt that Haitians are a resilient people, no doubt that they will cope with this, however many tens of thousands have died.

But when you promise a country that you will help it, help must arrive.

Back at the nursing college, from where the text message was sent by a survivor, a search and rescue team spent several hours yesterday afternoon, trying to get through the rubble. It was slow work but they did hear someone shout out from inside.

Then night fell, and the rescuers packed up. No lights they said. They couldn't work. A new team would be back at daybreak.

So tonight under the rubble we know there is at least one person alive, maybe more. And no-one is helping them.

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