PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti  The 10 Americans detained on kidnapping charges are pleading for the United States government to do more on their behalf and for the news media to focus on them less.

“Help us,” one of the detainees, Carla Thompson, said Monday as she lay on a bed in a scorching Port-au-Prince jail cell of about 8 feet by 5 feet, her ankles bandaged from infected mosquito bites. “That’s the message I would give to Mr. Obama and the State Department. Start helping us.”

Sitting on a dirty concrete floor in the cell, another detainee, Corinna Lankford, nodded in agreement, a frustrated look on her face. “I have faith in God,” Ms. Lankford said. “But maybe the U.S. government could help a little more, too.”

“No one is giving us any kind of information about what is going on,” she added.

The detainees, most of them affiliated with Baptist churches in Meridian and Twin Falls, Idaho, arrived in the chaotic days after the Jan. 12 earthquake. They were detained as they tried to take 33 Haitian children whom the Baptists said had been orphaned into the neighboring Dominican Republic.