Residents fight for food as a police officer watches them after a major earthquake hit the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince January 14, 2010. Troops and planeloads of food and medicine streamed into Haiti on Thursday to aid a traumatized nation still rattled by aftershocks from the catastrophic earthquake that flattened homes and government buildings and buried countless people. [Agencies]

Edmond Mulet, a former UN peacekeeping chief in Haiti, was expected to arrive later Thursday from UN headquarters in New York to coordinate the relief effort. The first US military units to arrive took on a coordinating role at the airport, but State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley underlined, "We're not taking over Haiti."

Across the sprawling, hilly city, people milled about in open areas, hopeful for help, sometimes setting up camps amid piles of salvaged goods, including food scavenged from the rubble. Police and UN peacekeeper trucks pushed down crowded streets, showing little sign of coordinated action.

Small groups by roadsides could be seen burying dead. Other dust-covered bodies were being dragged down streets, toward hospitals where relatives hoped to leave them. Countless remained unburied, stacked up, children's bodies lying atop mothers, tiny feet poking from blankets.

The injured, meanwhile, waited for treatment in makeshift holding areas - outside the General Hospital, for example, where the stench from piles of dead, just a few yards (meters) away, wafted over the assembled living.

Here and there, small tragedies unfolded. In the Petionville suburb, friends held back Kettely Clerge - "I want to see her," she sobbed - as neighbors with bare hands tried to dig out her 9-year-old daughter, Harryssa Keem Clerge, pleading for rescue, from beneath their home's rubble.

At the collapsed UN peacekeeping headquarters, an Estonian guard, Tarmo Joveer, was pulled alive and unhurt from the ruins at 8 am Thursday, 39 hours after the quake - a "small miracle," Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in New York. But UN officials reported that 36 other UN personnel, mostly peacekeepers and international police, were confirmed dead and almost 200 remained missing, including top staff.

Nearby, firefighters from Fairfax County, Va., and a rescue team from China, with sniffer dogs, clambered through rubble and searched for signs of life. Two excavators stood by, ready to dig for survivors - or dead.

For the long-suffering people of Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, shock and disbelief were giving way to despair.

"We need food. The people are suffering. My neighbors and friends are suffering," said Sylvain Angerlotte, 22. "We don't have money. We don't have nothing to eat. We need pure water."

But life also went on. Brazilian soldiers helped deliver a baby girl in an improvised garage-hospital at their base, just hours after the quake hit. Capt. Fabricio Almeida de Moura said the child was doing well, but the life of the mother, who apparently went into labor from the shock of the tremor, was in danger from bleeding, the Agencia Brasil news service reported.

The unimaginable scope of the catastrophe left many Haitians, a fervently religious people, in helpless tears and prayer.

Reached by The Associated Press from New York, Yael Talleyrand, a 16-year-old student in Jacmel, on Haiti's south coast, told of thousands of people made homeless by the quake and sleeping on an airfield runway, "crying, praying and I had never seen this in my entire life."

Earlier, she said, one woman had run through Jacmel's streets screaming, "God, we know you can kill us! We know you're strongest! You don't need to show us!"