Search crews dig through quake rubble as relief mission takes shape

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- A rescue crew patiently chipped
away at concrete and debris early Sunday, trying to reach a woman who
sent a text message that she was buried beneath the ruins of a collapsed
bank.

The team with the Los Angeles County Search and Rescue had
been looking for the woman since Saturday afternoon, when a text
arrived: "I'm OK but help me, I can't take it anymore."

Hours
ticked by with no sign that the woman might still be alive. Rescue crews
hadn't seen or heard anything with high-tech cameras and listening
devices, and search dogs no longer picked up signs of life.

But
the crew said they would keep looking as long as it took -- as long as
there was any hope she might still be alive.

Hope has been in
short supply in Haiti since a 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated this
impoverished island nation on Tuesday.

While there has not been
an official count, estimates of the number of casualties in the capital
alone range from 100,000 to 150,000.

By Friday, 13,000 bodies had
been recovered, said U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping
Edmond Mulet. Among the dead are 15 Americans.

More than 300 U.N.
staffers are unaccounted for. Thirty-seven are confirmed dead,
including the top two civilian officials at the U.N. mission in Haiti, a
peacekeeping and police force established after the 2004 ouster of
then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

to Haiti Sunday, saying his heart was heavy and the trip would be short
but difficult. The U.N. is facing the gravest loss in its history, he
said. Ban was expected to tour the destruction at the U.N. building in
Port-au-Prince.

Even now, survivors still emerge from under
mounds of concrete. By Saturday, American search teams had pulled out 22
people from collapsed buildings.

Early Sunday, a man and a
teenage girl were found alive in the rubble of a grocery store housed in
a three-story building that had collapsed. A joint New York police and
fire urban rescue team found them. Both were taken to a U.N. hospital at
Port-au-Prince's airport, where the girl, about 13, was treated for leg
injuries and the man treated for undetermined injuries.

A third
person was found within a few hours, according to an official with a
Miami, Florida, search and rescue team assisting at the site.

The
New York team, in a statement from NYPD spokesman Paul Browne, said
earlier reports that a total of five people who were trapped were
"apparently erroneous." However, rescue officials told a CNN crew on the
scene that more victims are believed to be inside.

The five
survived on the grocery store's inventory of food and water, authorities
said.

Nearly 30 international rescue teams continued to comb the
disaster areas for more survivors.

One man, said to be the head
of the capital's tax office, was carried out alive on a stretcher amid
wild cheers from residents.

And a 2-month-old baby with broken
ribs was pulled out and airlifted to Florida in critical condition.

But
in many cases, rescue operations turned into recovery ones.

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the latest developments in Haiti

A Los Angeles rescue team
answered the desperate pleas of a mother who believed her young daughter
was trapped alive beneath the rubble of a day care center in downtown
Port-au-Prince.

They searched for eight hours Saturday. At some
point, the distinct sounds of tapping from within the crushed concrete
stopped.

As rescue personnel pulled away, the mother -- who stood
praying silently during the rescue efforts -- stayed put, holding on to
hope.

Despite the best attempts by aid groups, the country
remains in dire need of food, water and medical aid.

In open
fields, abandoned stadiums and empty warehouses in the capital, relief
workers set up makeshift hospitals. Residents flocked to them en masse.

Dr. Jennifer Furin was tending to about 300 patients at one such
hospital on a U.N. compound near Port-au-Prince's airport. Without
immediate surgery, a third of them will die, she predicted.

"They
will die of infections, they'll die of dead tissue, they'll die of
malnutrition and metabolic derangements," Furin, with the Harvard
Medical School, said.

Throughout the capital city, thousands of
bodies lay exposed to the sun or draped in sheets and cardboard.

Residents
who could not afford face masks smeared toothpaste below their nose to
fight the stench.

Hundreds of Haitians, without food and water
for four days, stretched their arms toward the sky as U.S. helicopters
dropped boxes of food in part of the battered capital. The residents
swarmed toward the boxes, ignoring the wind and dust kicked up by the
helicopter's blades.

For the most part, people stood in long,
orderly lines for food -- despite anxiety about whether there was enough
to go around.

On Friday, a food convoy with the World Food
Programme was forced to leave an area after men in the crowd starting
pushing and shoving their way to the trucks.

But Raymond Joseph,
the Haitian ambassador to the United States, said he did not believe
crowds would turn violent as long as food distribution continued.

U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton toured the capital Saturday -- the
highest-ranking U.S. official to visit since the quake.

She
pledged American assistance to the Haitian people, "today, tomorrow and
for the time ahead."

In addition to the immediate needs, Clinton
said the focus next week will switch to long-term recovery and
reconstruction.

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Amid the chaos, there were signs of
progress: more aid distribution sites and hospitals and a system for
identifying the dead.

Two common graves were dug Saturday and a
third completed Friday, said Mulet. There, the dead are photographed in
hopes of providing identification in the future for families.

U.S.
troops handed out about 2,500 meals in Pétionville on Saturday and 14
aid distribution points had been established.

The Port-au-Prince
airport remained overwhelmed by the influx of air traffic bringing in
supplies. Doctors Without Borders said Sunday that despite guarantees
given by the U.N. and the U.S. Defense Department, its cargo plane
carrying an inflatable surgical hospital was blocked from landing in
Port-au-Prince on Saturday and rerouted to Samana in the Dominican
Republic. The material was being sent by truck from Samana, but the
rerouting has added a 24-hour delay to the hospital's arrival, the
organization said.

Increasingly, Haitians were helping Haitians.

One local church was able to scrounge up some potato chips, bottled
water and juice to hand out.

Local authorities also were seen
setting up a makeshift clinic on a street corner in Port-au-Prince with
one doctor and a couple of tables and folding chairs.

In the
United States, former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush kicked
off a fundraising drive -- a donation push called the Clinton Bush Haiti
Fund, similar to the appeal led by Clinton and Bush's father, George
H.W. Bush, for the victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami.