By Alberto Barrera
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (news - web sites) (Reuters) - El Salvador's Roman Catholic Church issued an urgent call on Sunday for food and clothes from abroad for hundreds of thousands of disaster-weary victims of two quakes that have killed over 1,000 people this year.
With hundreds of schools destroyed or damaged by the major quakes -- the first on Jan. 13 and the second on Feb. 13 -- the government also said it was suspending the school year in the tiny Central American country of 6.2 million people.
The decision was the latest setback after the quakes that have also left tens of thousands of people homeless and devastated infrastructure across the impoverished, coffee-exporting nation.
''I call on the international community to urgently and generously send aid of all kind: food, clothing, money,'' the Archbishop of San Salvador (news - web sites), Fernando Saenz Lacalle, said after delivering Mass in the capital of the devout, Catholic-dominated country.
A 6.6-magnitude quake on Tuesday killed more than 300 people in 30 towns throughout the center of El Salvador to add to the toll of over 800 deaths from January's 7.6-magnitude disaster.
Aid from countries, including the United States, Mexico, Honduras, Taiwan and Spain, has been flown in but quake victims are still clamoring for drinking water, food and building materials.
The quakes have been followed by hundreds of aftershocks, including one of 5.3 magnitude on Saturday that caused some already-damaged walls to collapse and further rattled Salvadoreans' nerves.
Call For Calm
President Francisco Flores called for calm in a radio address late on Saturday. Many residents of the capital heard the message outside their homes where they spent the night for fear of fresh collapses.
The quakes and aftershocks have traumatized a nation that was the scene of a brutal 12-year civil war that ended with a U.N.-brokered peace accord in 1992.
Private-sector groups have estimated the quakes have caused $3 billion in damage to housing, roads, water systems and schools.
On Sunday, Education Minister Evelyn Jacir de Lovo announced the public school year had been suspended ''until further notice.''
The damage is devastating for an economy that has an annual output estimated by the Inter-American Development Bank of about $8 billion.