Most Haitians Have Lean Christmas : Caribbean: Police monitors throw party for 450 children. GIs to have turkey, trimmings; some still grumble.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Some U.S. soldiers grumbled Saturday about being stuck here for Christmas, despite free concerts and tons of turkey and pumpkin pie for Christmas dinner.

The American troops at Camp Democracy, their main base near the airport, entertained themselves on Christmas Eve with talent shows, a barbecue, a 10-kilometer run and two concerts by rhythm-and-blues singer Kissie Darnell. As they played volleyball, hungry Haitians gawked at them through their base fence.

The U.S. Army’s Christmas activities focused on its own. It planned no formal handouts of food or toys to Haitians, whose country is the hemisphere’s poorest.

But in the capital, police monitors from 20 nations, here to retrain and observe Haitian police, threw a party for needy kids at Christ-Roi Roman Catholic church.

They handed out sneakers, watches, toys and candy to about 450 squealing, wide-eyed youngsters. Raymond Kelly, the former New York City police commissioner and chief of the monitors, paid for the gifts.

“We contacted this church, got the names and shoe sizes of the kids, then Santa called out each of their names with a gift,” Kelly said. “We gotta do what we gotta do.”

Scores of youngsters outside pressed against barred windows screaming “Papa Noel!” at monitors spokesman Paul Browne, dressed up as Santa Claus.

Christmas is a big event in Haiti. Throughout the crowded capital, poor people emerged from slums dressed in their best clothes--small girls with crisp pink dresses and hair ribbons and men and boys in suits and ties--for church.

Radio stations played French and Haitian Christmas music nonstop. Peasants sold scrawny Christmas trees to the wealthy.

A French military transport plane brought 10 tons of donated food, medicine, clothes and toys for needy Haitians on Friday.

“If it were up to us, we would bring in 10 planeloads, when you see all the misery they have here,” said Joachim Palladino, a French gendarme who is part of the multinational force.

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About 200 yards from the U.S. base, alongside the choked airport road, Lise Josephat, 28, sat by her wheelbarrow full of sugar cane sticks, chewed here as snacks.

She said she makes between $2 and $5 a day, barely enough to feed her two young daughters, who sat barefoot in the dust at her feet. Their father fled by boat with other refugees about 18 months ago, at the height of army terror under the former regime, and she hasn’t heard from him since.

When asked what she planned for Christmas, Josephat chuckled, then said, “Nothing.”

“I have some rice and beans at home. Maybe the church people will give my kids something else to eat,” said Josephat, who lives in the Cite Soleil slum.

At the U.S. base, the holiday ambience didn’t comfort some soldiers.

“I was in Somalia last Christmas and in Germany for two years before that,” said Spec. Carl Savoy, 24, of Washington, D.C. He’ll be on guard duty all day today. “I could think of funner places to be now.”

Most of the 5,800 U.S. troops in Haiti were to have Christmas Day off.

For their Christmas dinner, U.S. military planes flew in 3,000 pounds of turkey, 2,000 pounds of roast beef, 1,000 pounds of shrimp, more than 12,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables, 4,000 pounds of hard candy and enough pumpkin pie and fruitcake for all the soldiers.

“It bothers a lot of us,” Staff Sgt. Dennis Johnson, 25, said of the poverty that surrounds him. “We’re not supposed to give them food because that draws huge crowds around the vehicles.”

Johnson, from Tallahassee, Fla., has a wife and 2-year-old daughter at his base in Ft. Bragg, N.C. He’s been in Haiti since U.S. troops arrived to remove army rulers in September and restore populist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the army ousted in 1991.