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Journalism of Courage
For four days, Dr Mohammed Iqbal and his staff stitched up earthquake victims with ordinary sewing thread and wrapped the patients’ wounds with torn pieces of dirty clothes. A semblance of relief finally came to the clinic in this mountainside village on Wednesday: enough antiseptic, antibiotics, syringes and bandages to get through one more day.
The Pakistani relief workers delivering the supplies also threw in 12 boxes of Valium, which were not expected to do much good for either the patients’ agony or the doctor’s frayed nerves. ‘‘We use them as painkillers, but they aren’t strong enough,’’ Iqbal shouted above the terrified screams of eight-year-old Keala Khan, who suffered a gash at least six inches long across his scalp during Saturday’s earthquake. Now, a medical assistant was trying to clean out the dirt, disinfect the raw flesh, and stitch it up. ‘‘Momma! Momma!’’ he cried out in pain.
Iqbal, however, fears that the worst may be yet to come. The 7.6 magnitude quake left so many homeless, and sleeping outside in freezing weather in the mountains of Pakistani Kashmir, that his patients are beginning to come down with pneumonia, flu and other potentially fatal illnesses. Iqbal said he has already treated 15 quake victims with pneumonia. ‘‘If we don’t get proper aid soon, that will be the next storm,’’ he warned. ‘‘It is really getting worse day by day.’’
Snow is already falling on the higher peaks of the Hindu Kush range and villagers living at around 5,000 feet up the mountainsides near Dherkot say they expect the flakes to fly in no more than six weeks. Last winter, one of the harshest in memory here, villages were covered by almost eight feet of snow in January.
Iqbal’s clinic, run by Pakistan’s government, was so poorly equipped when the quake struck that it ran out of even the most basic drugs and medical supplies in the first hours of the catastrophe. The doctor fears that the roughly 50,000 mountain villagers who depend on him for healthcare will be forsaken again when winter sets in.
‘‘We don’t need anything to eat — just tents,’’ said Raja Mumtaz, 30, as an army truck rumbled past. LATWP
press trust of india
MUZAFFARABAD, OCTOBER 13
On Saturday morning at the combined military hospital, doctor Adnan Kader watched the world collapse around him.
With the paediatric ward flattened, medics were trying to dig people from the rubble. Hundreds of people requiring medical attention staggered around in a haze of dust and screams. Two hundred patients were in the hospital in the regional capital Muzaffarabad, along with dozens of staff and some 260 soldiers when the monster quake struck.
“There was at first, very strong tremor for around three seconds and then the hospital collapsed like a house of cards. I ran. I don’t know how I got out of there,” said Kader.
He looked for his wife, went to get his 11-year-old daughter and then ran to assess damage to the hospital wards. He found the women and children’s ward crushed, reduced to ribbons of cement and steel. Some 70 people were inside, including 60 children under 12. The psychiatric ward was pulverised, taking with it 10 patients. The same happened to the pulmonary department and the paramedic school.
He saw dozens of patients dressed in hospital pyjamas flee in panic from one new building that was less badly damaged.
“There were shouts of ‘help! help!’ we ran to the ruins and were digging with our bare hands. We managed to get out 30 people,” added Kader.
Captain Ehmad Jaz was sleeping when the quake struck and does not know who helped him get outside. His room was near the officers’ mess and withstood the shockwaves. The nearby kitchen was flattened.
Jaz joined in the desperate search for survivors. “We shouted names and as soon as we heard something we started to dig. Over there we saved a family and here a nurse. After seven hours we pulled out the cook.”
During those initial hours, hundreds of bodies and injured victims arrived from nearby areas. But all the medical equipment and medicine had been destroyed. Local pharmacies gave what they could.
