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 also wounded, displaced & missing, prisoners of war (both sides), general living conditions, news articles & daily Red Cross field reports ~ April 16 ~ |
April 16INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS DAILY BULLETIN
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BAGHDAD HOSPITAL COPES WITH TAINTED WATER, FEW SUPPLIES, NO ELECTRICITY The Kansas City Star. BAGHDAD, Iraq: posted 16 April 2993: At 11 a.m., a woman in a red dress is moaning, hands limp by her sides, head lolled back, her face a sickly yellow. A friend is touching her arm, not speaking but pleading with red-rimmed eyes for someone to help. It's clear to her here, at St. Raphael Hospital, that there is little help to be had right now. The halls and rooms of the 40-bed, four-story building are packed, with sick mothers-to-be, sick children and people wounded while defending their homes from looting. After more than a decade of sanctions that drained supplies, and now with the immediate strain of war, hospitals throughout Iraq are overwhelmed. Faiz N. Minosha, a doctor, tries to hurry down the dirty, white tiles of St. Raphael but is stopped every few steps. Someone points to his head, someone else to her son, someone else asks where to find his wife. "There is great need right now, but there is little we can do," he says as he walks. "We have no medicines, especially none for children. But everyone is sick or getting sick. There is no electricity in the city. The water is bad. There is a lot of disease. And, of course, there was the war." As he walks, the noise in the halls is white, a jumble of cries and shouts and urgent messages. A girl in a purple dress is covered with red spots. "All I did was mix her some milk," the mother tells Minosha, holding the girl tight by the legs. "Look at her." He clucks. "She used cold water to mix the dry milk," he said. "The water isn't safe unless you boil it first these days. We see this all day long. I think the spots are from fever, but what can we do?" Minosha heads off to deal with another patient as Zaid Jameel steps over to help. Jameel is a doctor from Jordan. He was in Iraq working at a different hospital until a few days ago. "So many were hurt and sick, we had to work," he says while looking at the girl. "But when the looting started, they came to the hospital. They took everything -- the medicines, the machines, the instruments. They would not even know what these things were, and they took them. Some they took to steal. Some they smashed. Some they burned. Everything was destroyed." As the mother and child move away, Jameel leans back against a wall. He's been working 15-hour days for weeks now, with all the wounded. Like Minosha, he has been working for free. "You know, I went to school in America, at Northwestern in Chicago," he says, smiling, shaking his head at what surrounds him. "My girlfriend is still there. It's different there." By noon, the woman in the red dress has been moved from a hard plastic chair onto a wheeled stretcher. Still, there is no one free to see her. But now the friend pats her hair. The woman moans and stares at the walls. The hospital is tiny by American standards, covering a quarter of a city block. It is run by the Red Cross and worked by nurses from the Roman Catholic Church across the street, perhaps the only things that saved it from looting, the doctors think. From first light, just after the dusk-to-dawn curfew, and after the nighttime gunplay stops, patients have been pouring in. Most arrive by foot or orange and white taxi. Many are expectant mothers, many of whom have been hiding inside through the past weeks. Jameel pauses to talk to a man about drinking the water. Hospital staff have been trying to discourage people from drinking the city water. But the man was drinking from the tap. Jameel runs a hand through his hair, then says: "Look, I don't ask for any money. I do this because people need help. It would be nice to be able to help them. But we have nothing for the children, nothing." On the top floor, past old American medical company artwork, prints of "The Era of Antibiotics" and "Hippocrates: Medicine Becomes a Science," hospital Administrator Michael E.G. Al-Haik is just waking from a nap. He has been at work for a week now. "I don't have time to go home," he says. "The minister of health says the hospital must stay open, 24 hours a day, so I work here." He says that during the war the hospital was flooded with injuries. Immediately after the war, the looting injuries started to show up. And now, he says, the family crises are arriving. "Many people have been afraid to leave their homes during the fighting," he said. "So today we see many, many people. Maybe this means life is getting back to normal here." In a city where there is little electricity, getting warnings about the water and unsafe foods out to the people is very difficult. "This is not a place for politics," he says. "This is where people come for healing. But it is the world of politics that now controls what we must do and what we can do for the people. It is always this way." Downstairs, the woman in the red dress is wheeled into an examination room just after 1 p.m. "No light, no water, no nothing. We've been abandoned. What are we supposed to do for her?" says a nurse as she walks behind. Jameel is leaning over a 10-year-old boy. Outside there are sounds of firearms popping. "This one, he's just afraid of the dark," Jameel says. "He's too afraid to eat, and now he's sick, sick with aches in the stomach, in the heart, in the head. He's afraid of what happens after dark. "He should be. He's just like the others, though. I don't have anything to offer him." |
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