PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti  When the aid helicopters descend on the Pétionville Club golf course, once a playground for the wealthy and now a sprawling city of makeshift tents, the residents hurry toward them. But to get there, they must climb a steep embankment to a landing zone on top of a hill where the 82nd Airborne Division distributes the food and water.

For Richard Domand, a homeless man in his 70s who was partially paralyzed by typhoid, it was too much.

He arrived in the morning but made it only halfway up the hill, where into the late afternoon he was lying on the ground next to his cane. A woman had given him one of the two bottles of water she had gotten from the Americans, but he said he had gotten no food.

“I cannot make it up,” he says.

Even as more aid flows into Haiti nearly a week after a devastating earthquake, the challenges faced by the 82nd Airborne in handing out food and water here illustrate the hurdles in distributing it across the city. Roads are clogged with traffic and rubble. Confusion is rampant. Everywhere, people ask, “Where do I go?”