Potential 2012 US presidential candidate Sarah Palin began a weekend tour of Haiti on Saturday against the backdrop of deadly political unrest whipped up by disputed elections.
Stepping off a yellow helicopter, Palin visited a community where Christian relief organization Samaritan's Purse provides shelter for victims of an earthquake in January that killed 250,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless.
"I've really enjoyed meeting this community," Palin said. "They are so full of joy. We are so fortunate in America and we are responsible for helping those less fortunate. Samaritan's Purse is still here doing the tough work."
Palin, accompanied by leading US evangelist and Samaritan's Purse president Franklin Graham, was seeing for herself the massive devastation from the quake and learning about a cholera outbreak that has claimed more than 2,200 lives.
"I don't know of any people in recent years who have suffered more, and in such a short period of time than the people of this small country, with an earthquake, a hurricane, and now a cholera epidemic," Graham said.
"Anything we do for them, we do it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. I want the people of Haiti to know that God has not forgotten them. He loves them, he cares for them."
The visit was tightly controlled for security reasons and only a show host traveling with Palin from Fox News, a US television channel for which she is a contributor, had any direct access to the tour party on Saturday.
Photographs released by Samaritan's Purse showed Palin at a camp interacting with a young mother and baby and holding the feet of another small child as she comforted cholera victims at a treatment center near the capital.
Palin, the 46-year-old former Alaska governor who ran as losing Republican candidate John McCain's running mate in the 2008 presidential election, was undeterred by recent violent demonstrations that left five people dead.
The streets of the capital, eerily bare on Friday as putrid tire smoke lingered in the air, were once again teeming with people, many of them stocking up on supermarket goods, fearful the period of calm may not last long.
More violence is feared and several hundred supporters of an opposition candidate took to the streets again on Saturday evening in the capital's smart Petionville suburb, although the protests initially passed off peacefully.
The electoral commission has appealed for calm while it awaits the findings of a seven-member committee set up to investigate the fraud-tainted polls, the first since the January earthquake that left the capital in ruins.
Palin has become a media phenomenon since her unsuccessful vice-presidential bid and has spent much of the past year stumping for Republican congressional candidates at the head of the arch-conservative "Tea Party" movement.
The vocal opponent of President Barack Obama admits she is mulling a White House bid in 2012. The trip to Haiti represents a rare overseas foray for a politician who has been criticized for her lack of foreign affairs expertise.
The Palin delegation plans to visit cholera programs on Sunday and distribute Christmas shoe-box gifts to children, a statement on the Samaritan's Purse website said.
The Christian relief organization has treated over 4,000 patients and trained 110 Haitian doctors and nurses since the cholera outbreak erupted in mid-October, according to the website.
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