PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) – Hundreds of children and adults sheltered at a high school in Haiti’s capital on Saturday after fleeing shooting in a neighbourhood where fighting between two rival gangs in recent weeks has caused dozens of deaths and destroyed homes.
General coordinator for the religious community group Kizito Francisco Seriphin said 315 people had taken refuge in the Saint-Louis de Gonzague school, which is in the Delmas district neighbouring the violence-wracked Cite Soleil neighbourhood.
Classes are out for summer vacation, and classrooms at the high school have been converted into dormitories, where some of the teenagers, children and toddlers sleep on small mattresses provided by the non-profit group. Others must sleep on the floor without mattresses.
Young people chatted and joked in the schoolyard on Saturday, while others played football and basketball or jumped rope.
Seriphin said many of the children sheltering at the school came without their parents. Some youngsters stood in line waiting to give information about fathers and mothers, some who are missing and others who the gangs prevented from leaving Cite Soleil.
“We need a lot of help,” said Jean Michelet, a 16-year-old who said he was wounded on the day that the gang battles erupted in early July.
“I was home on the day the war started. There was a lot of shooting. A bullet went through the roof and it hit me in the head,” he said.
He said a nun took him to a hospital to have the injury treated.
Michelet said a lot of people had been killed during the gunbattles.
“The situation is really bad,” he said.
