FOND VERRETTES, Haiti (AP) – Plagued by abject poverty and illiteracy, Haiti’s children often are the first casualties of disaster.

Recent floods were no exception.

Weakened by endemic malnutrition and not knowing how to swim, nearly half of the approximately 1,700 victims on the Haitian-Dominican border are believed to have been children.

Mothers wept over tiny caskets that lined muddy streets in the Dominican border town of Jimani last week – haunting testimony to victims from torrents of water that swept away three neighbourhoods of wooden shacks built by Haitian migrants.

Small bodies were among victims thrown into shallow mass graves in Jimani when the number of dead – up to nearly 500 on the Dominican side – overwhelmed officials.

Their deaths will add to statistics that list Haiti as one of the most dangerous countries in the world to try to survive childhood, according to a Save the Children report published last month.

“The challenges children face in Haiti on a good day are among the worst in the world,” said Save the Children spokesman Mike Kiernan, noting Haiti has the highest infant mortality rate in the hemisphere and one of the worst in the world.

Aid agencies in Haiti still were trying to reach the smallest survivors in the hardest-hit villages yesterday, 10 days after the disaster struck.

“They (children) are the most vulnerable in this emergency,” said Inigo Alvarez, a spokesman for the UN World Food Programme (WFP). “Nearly half of the food will likely be for children.”

A WFP convoy of trucks arrived yesterday in the southeast village of Fond Verrettes, the first road convoy since US Marines leading a multinational force suspended relief helicopter flights this week, saying the crisis was over.

“The crisis is not over for thousands of families who have not been reached,” Kiernan said of families which in Haiti average five children.

Kiernan praised the work of the military, saying “there’s no question about it – they have saved lives” ferrying food last week to farming centres at Fond Verrettes and neighbouring Mapou, along the south-central corner of Hispaniola shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

But Kiernan said aid workers have identified nine villages that have not been reached since the floods, with residents numbering thousands of families among up to 20,000 estimated in urgent need of food aid.

Thousands of people ran out to meet the trucks that lumbered into Fond Verrettes, entering by a riverbed choked with boulders and rocks swept down from denuded mountains, with one sole lopsided house perched precariously on the bank. It was the first time food was being delivered there in nearly a week.

In the crowd were hundreds of children, all with a story to tell of lost parents, friends and siblings carried away by the floods that barreled down the mountainsides while many still were sleeping, before dawn on May 24.

“I saw the water taking everything. It took my cousins and it took a lot of my friends – it killed at least eight of my friends,” said Mildred Mira, a 16-year-old so stunted by malnutrition she looked six.

“A lot of us are still really scared because at night we’re always thinking that more rains are going to come,” she said.

Aid workers say that is all too likely as the six-month hurricane season debuted Tuesday in the Caribbean. A look at the mountains from which doom descended on Fond Verrettes show ravines of brown trails cutting through green grass, indicating the paths of the murderous torrents.