THE smell of death hung heavy in the air all around the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince.

Two days after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere, bodies were still buried beneath crumpled sections of buildings. Scores of badly decomposed ones were strewn along roadways, where the living, injured and the dying were gathered — taking refuge out in the open.

When the Sunday Observer visited the capital last Thursday, scores of people were milling around. Some were busy digging through rubble — searching for food or signs of life — while others wandered aimlessly down main streets, fear and bewilderment etched on their faces.

On Thursday, officials announced that about 7,000 people had been buried in a mass grave, and by Friday, the death toll had risen to 15,000.

It was scenes like these that 33-year-old Haitian Dorothy Michele was trying desperately to escape when the Sunday Observer interviewed her outside the Toussaint L’ouverture International Airport.

Michele, the mother of a seven-year-old, had been camping out at the airport hoping to get on a commercial flight to the United States of America.

Michele, who started working as a maid in her “teens”, said her employers had “helped” her to get a US visa so she could accompany them on vacations overseas.

“My visa is good. Your government gave me. Look, see…” she shouted at the police officers barring uninjured Haitians congesting the tiny airport.

I hated telling her she would not be allowed to leave as there were no commercial flights going out.

“I am tired. I walked from Delmas to here (airport). Delmas is on the ground, many dead. I am tired. I want to get out…” she told the Sunday Observer.

She was among hundreds of people who had gathered outside the airport waiting to flee the country.

But several Haitians told the Sunday Observer that they would not abandon Haiti in its time of need.

“Ayti (Haiti) is my home. Ayti is husband, my wife…” Edy Francois of La Paix said, with a pained expression on his face.

He vowed never to leave.

Haitians abroad too, were crying for their country.

Marie-Ephese Louis-Jacques Jean and her husband Ronald, as well as their children Kevin and Jennifer told the Sunday Observer that they were “heartbroken”.

“Haiti has been through so much. It’s hard to think that she can stand much more. It’s very hard. But we have to pray for our beloved country,” Louis-Jacques Jean said from Canada on Friday night.

Some Jamaicans living in Haiti have refused to leave, even though the Jamaican Government sent two aeroplanes for its citizens on Friday.

“You know, I told my brethren to come on this flight, but he said he was waiting for the other one to come,” Michael Kirk said Friday as he arrived at the Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston.

Kirk, who is from St Catherine, was an employee of mobile providers Digicel. He had arrived in Haiti the same day as the earthquake.

“Boy it bad. Place just mash up, buildings covered up in broken concrete, everywhere that I see…” he told the Sunday Observer on Friday.

Craig Mahabeer, who also arrived home on the same flight, recalled that he had been “as frightened as hell” as the road started moving while he was driving.

“The same day we arrived it (earthquake) happened,” shared Tony Archer, chairman of the Caribbean Civil Aviation Security System.

“All the dead bodies on the streets have started to rot. It’s terrible,” he said, shortly after arriving in Jamaica en route to Barbados.

Archer said he was very sad because two of his team members were still missing.

“We were on the road going to the hotel when it happened,” he said. “It is extensively damaged. We spent the night on the tennis court with all the other people. But the situation there is terrible. Bodies are rotting, and they are piled up everywhere. It is very sad.”