(This story was originally published September 8, 2008.)

CABARET, Haiti -- Frantz Samedi had searched for his 5-year-old for two hours, trudging through heaps of storm debris and muddy water, calling her name, "Tamasha, Tamasha!"

When he finally found her, she seemed to be peacefully asleep, her body resting on the wet, mud-laden concrete slab next to 11 other children, ages 1 to 8. The graying man pressed his way through the crowd of survivors, carrying a pot of water. He knelt beside the lifeless body, gently washing the mud off his little girl with a sponge. "I can't leave her in this condition, " Samedi said, sobbing. "I should have died in her place." Tamasha and the other children were torn from their families when Ike swept through this poor oceanside town early Sunday. The tragedy here was but a microscopic glimpse of widespread devastation across the country.

Haiti awoke to a trail of human wreckage Sunday morning, much of it strewn through this town just north of the capital city of Port-au-Prince, where shortly after 2 a.m., Hurricane Ike's pounding deluge drove residents out of their homes and into the blinding sheets of rain. Two raging rivers overflowed their banks, swallowing up houses as the roiling waters broke doors down and poured through windows.

Ike killed at least 61 people in Haiti -- 57 of them in Cabaret -- government officials said. More than a dozen of them were children, swept away by the rains and rivers as their parents tried to run for cover in the middle of the heavy downpour.

The total death toll from back-to-back storms increased to more than 300, officials said Sunday. About one million people were left homeless by the four consecutive storms that brushed past this environmentally fragile and deeply impoverished country of 8.5 million people.

President René Préval told The Miami Herald on Sunday that his government "has made a huge effort" to provide assistance. He said that plans were under way to send money to all 142 municipalities in the country, but that "Haiti needs a flood of helicopters, at least 25 with pilots, " to help the country get food to storm victims.

"This is Katrina in the entire country but without the means that Louisiana had, " Préval said.

Both the United States and Venezuela announced Sunday that relief was on the way.

The USS Kearsarge was expected to arrive early Monday in Port-au-Prince with eight helicopters and three landing craft to carry relief supplies from the capital to affected areas in the north and south, said U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Mari Tolliver.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is providing $7.1 million to relieve immediate suffering and to support longer-term rehabilitation and recovery. Staff members from USAIDs Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were dispatched to assist in relief efforts.

Venezuela, meanwhile, said it was sending 20 tons of food and relief supplies. President Hugo Chávez said Sunday that a plane loaded with food and bottled water would fly to the port city of Gonaives, along with aid workers and medicine.

What Tropical Storm Fay, Hurricane Gustav and Tropical Storm Hanna didn't fully demolish, Ike finished off -- destroying scores of additional homes and desperately needed plantations, leaving entire communities submerged by flash floods.

And the largest outlying cities in this mountainous nation -- Gonaives and Cap-Haitien in the north, Les Cayes and Jeremie in the south -- were completely cut off from the capital, and from one another.