KARNAH: Needles, bloodied bandages, garbage and faeces litter the compound around the main hospital in the earthquake-ravaged Karnah region in occupied Kashmir. Inside the single-storey hospital, the picture is equally as grim. Cats and stray dogs wander through the rubble-strewn corridors.
Four days after the devastating weekend quake which killed tens of thousands across South Asia, victims are still entering the hospital, desperately in need of help.
Five-year-old Sughrah, a pretty, rosy-cheeked girl, is screaming in pain.
Her upset uncle looks for a doctor to work the x-ray machine. He finds one, but there is no power. So Sughrah lies on a wooden bed for five more minutes, screaming: “I want mummy.”
A soldier tries to calm her.
Finally, soldiers manage to rig up electricity from the generator and an x-ray is taken. The reason for her pain is clear — multiple fractures of her hip.
She has lived with this since Saturday morning when the 7.6 magnitude quake hit. It was only when her constant crying became too much for her family that they sought help.
Karnah, one of the worst hit areas in occupied Kashmir, lies close to the line of control. The town stands 55 km from Muzaffarabad, the main city in Azad Kashmir which bore the brunt of the quake.
In a fly-infested ward, at least three dozen unwashed patients lie on beds covered with dirty blankets, underlining how authorities in occupied Kashmir are struggling to cope.
“If I knew it would have been like this, I would have never come to his hospital,” says Farooq Ahmed, a government doctor who volunteered to come here from another district 250 km (155 miles) away. “It has been like hell.”
A burly man in his 30s, he has not stopped working since Saturday night, barring four or five hours’ sleep, as patients poured in from surrounding hamlets with head injuries, fractures and deep cuts and often in deep shock.
He has treated more than 550 patients — well over 100 a day — and been forced to process x-rays in a converted toilet because the darkroom is unusable.
Ahmed has also had to sweep up — many hospital workers have not come in — dress patients, splint limbs and give anaesthetic with the help of soldiers.
He’s been abused and roughed up by desperate relatives of the injured.
Still, he has stayed. Others have not.
When other volunteer doctors turned up, saw the lack of power, the cracked walls and falling plaster, the filthy toilets, and no nurses to help them, they worked briefly and fled.
“They saw it here, worked a bit and disappeared,” Ahmed, wearing dirty jeans and a blue jacket, says with a wry smile.
But patients like Aziz Jou, a middle-aged farmer lying dressed in a filthy grey salwar-kameez unchanged since he was bought in on Saturday, have no choice.—Reuters
