One of them was Maria del Carmen Gonzalez, who directed a team of sweat-drenched men Monday as they frantically loaded a rickety truck with air conditioning units from her quake-damaged store.

"The people that broke into my store yesterday are the same ones helping me load this truck today," the diminutive Gonzalez, 36, told AFP.

"Hey, you! Where are you going with that?" an angry Gonzalez cries out in Spanish to one of the 'volunteers.'

Gonzalez, a native of the nearby Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic, has little choice: as the days go on after the powerful 7.0 earthquake, downtown Port-au-Prince becomes ever more dangerous.

Gonzalez said she will pay the workers when the job is done. She is also paying four police officers on patrol 300 dollars for protection.

Her merchandise was never 100 percent insured. "We never thought anything like this would happen," she said.

Haitians have survived hurricanes, civil wars and high crime rates, but the last quake to strike the country was in 1842.

"We had no earthquake insurance," said hardware store owner Jean-Claude Lamothe, 56.

Earthquake insurance was available during the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier in the 1970s and 80s, "but then we stopped paying it," he said.

"Starting in the 1990s political instability increased, and so did the rates for multi-risk insurance," he said, trying to explain why he had none.

Haiti's last insurance company, Nadal, instead went into the more lucrative import-export business, Lamothe said.

"I was born here. My brothers and sisters went to the United States and Europe, but I want to live in my country," he said.

Lamothe has no merchandise to load into any truck -- he lost it all, along with some relatives. His store today is a pile of concrete and twisted metal.

Down the street a laundromat owner gazes at his property: the building is still standing and his machines are safe, but enormous cracks in the walls are enough to scare off anyone thinking of entering.

"I think I'm insured, I just don't know if the policy covers earthquakes," said the owner, Max Gener.

As the sun set, more looters appeared.

Shots rang out in the distance as shadowy figures flee, clutching bolts of fabric, soda bottles, pants -- anything they can get hold of.

Along the JJ Dessalines Boulevard, the city's main commercial avenue, merchants loaded four more trucks with goods.

Wissam Harbour, a Haitian of Palestinian origin and Gonzalez's husband, was supervising a team of workers loading television sets and refrigerators onto a truck. He was closing down the second store he owns.

"My wife? She almost got killed," he told AFP.

When her truck was loaded and Gonzalez got behind the steering wheel, some of the 'volunteers' who helped load the vehicle jumped up and tried to pull her aside.

They grabbed her by the neck, Harbour said, and almost pulled her out the window, but Gonzalez managed to start the truck and drive off to safety.

Right now the merchants are storing their goods at home, putting it wherever it fits, Harbour said.

"We don't know what the future holds for Haiti," he said.

earlier related report
Haiti PM begs for quake aid as looting spreads
Port-Au-Prince (AFP) Jan 25, 2010 - Haiti's premier begged foreign donors Monday to back the reconstruction of his quake-hit country as fresh looting and chaotic food hand-outs underscored the grim conditions facing survivors.

Nearly two weeks after the disaster, which killed around 150,000 people and left a million homeless, international powers meeting in Montreal heard that it would take at least a decade to rebuild the stricken Caribbean nation.

Haitian police shot two people in the head as scavengers plundered the debris in the ruined heart of Port-au-Prince, while thousands more people joined a mass exodus from squalid tent camps in the capital.

"The country is ravaged, I ask myself how it can be rebuilt after this catastrophe. The Haitian government is very corrupt," said Gesnel Faustin, 29, living in a tent outside Haiti's destroyed presidential palace.

In Montreal, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said the world must map out a long-term strategy for the Americas' poorest country, after meeting immediate needs for food, water, shelter and health care.

"I just want to say that the people of Haiti will need to be helped to face this colossal work of reconstruction," Bellerive told world officials including US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper warned of a long path ahead to rebuild Haiti and urged the world to hash out a "coordinated" plan for the ill-starred country.

"It was not an exaggeration to say that at least 10 years of hard work awaits the world in Haiti," Harper said.

Donor countries had agreed to hold a full conference on aid to Haiti at the UN headquarters in New York in March, Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon said.

Haiti's President Rene Preval, in a statement from Port-au-Prince, urged the world to urgently airlift a further 200,000 tents and 36 million ready-to-eat ration packs before the country's rainy season starts in May.

Nobel peace prize winning NGO Handicap International was racing to supply temporary prosthetics for the large numbers of people who lost limbs in the quake.

"The first plane-load of short-term DynaCast prosthetics is already in the country," said Wendy Batson, executive director of the US branch of Handicap International.

Batson said the disabling injuries in Haiti "surpass anything we've ever seen anywhere else."

International rescuers led by 20,000 US troops have struggled to get enough aid in the capital and badly-hit towns near the epicentre of the 7.0-magnitude quake, increasing fears about post-quake security.

A group of Haitian police, trying to keep control among a desperate population after the quake also wrecked the city prison, opened fire on a warehouse in the capital where many looters were hiding out.

An AFP photographer inside the building said two men were shot in the head, one of whom received medical attention.

At the presidential palace, a daily aid hand-out turned into a chaotic scramble as a small team of Uruguayan UN peacekeepers faced off against a crowd of 4,000 desperately hungry Haitians.

"Whatever we do, it doesn't matter -- they are animals," said one UN trooper as others sprayed pepper spray and fired rubber bullets into the air.

Bulldozers cleared corpse-filled houses elsewhere in the city centre, as hopes dimmed of finding more miracle survivors in the rubble. The last, a man who survived for 11 days by drinking cola, was found on Saturday.

The UN said more than 235,000 Haitians have taken advantage of free buses to flee the filthy conditions in Port-au-Prince for more hygienic camps outside the capital. Others have used private transport.

Health Minister Alex Larsen said tents were being readied for 400,000 quake victims at mini-villages outside the capital that will initially hold 20,000 people, and in the long term accommodate around one million.

But the tide of humanity is putting a huge burden on small towns outside the capital where thousands of desperate people are staying with family, friends or even strangers.

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