Batticaloa, Thursday, 6th January.
In the morning, Daya gave me a ride to the main district office of the TRO (Tamil Rehabilitation Organization). In the first days after the tsunami, as my family and I gathered around our TV in London, listening in disbelief to the news pouring in from Sri Lanka, TRO was the main organization sending out field reports. Sadly, their work in relief and reconstruction was already in full swing long before the tsunami struck: decades of ethnic war had left thousands dead or missing with an estimated 20,000 Tamils (some as young as 9 years old) recovering from the effects of government torture camps. Since the last two years of ceasefire, dozens of Tamils who found political asylum in the West have returned to work for TRO and to help rebuild their broken communities.
For the last five years, TRO's main headquarters in the East has been in a large, rented family house in the center of the city. As I enter the main hall, I see half a dozen tables that have been set up for the administrative staff. The tables are jam-packed with telephones, computers and files and there is a buzz of staff, moving from room to room. A whiteboard on the wall lists the refugee camps and the names of the medics assigned for today. I see my name is already down for 3 of the camps.
A white TRO mini-van pulls up outside. It has just driven over 300 miles through the night to bring medical supplies from the capital, Colombo. Immediately, staff and volunteers run outside. They hurriedly unpack the van, ferrying armfuls of bottles and cardboard boxes into the storage room downstairs. Within minutes, the van has been stripped down and is ready to go again. TRO, like most of the aid agencies here, is desperately short of vehicles. When a delivery van comes in from Colombo, it is immediately press-ganged into service in the field, and is only returned when it needs to make the back-breaking journey back through the jungle to the other side of the country.
My team jump on board. It is a small ten-seater van and together with all our supplies, we take up every available inch. There are two other doctors (one Norweigian, one British) apart from myself, along with one final-year medical student, one pharmacist-in-training and five further Tamil paramedics and nurses from the northern town of Vavuniya.
The next thirty minutes are spent bumping along pot-holed roads, all of us clutching equipment so that it doesn't shatter before we arrive. When we get to the first camp (Cheddipalayam) there is already another team of doctors there, sent by one of the foreign aid agencies. We go on to the next camp, but the story is repeated there again. Finally, we get to our third assigned camp at 10.30 a.m. It is in the small village of Puthukudiruppu: 600 families have been crowded into the village Hindu high school there. We spend the next 6 hours attending to patients. Many are suffering respiratory infections after their ordeal in the water. Others have sprains and swollen limbs where their bodies were smashed against the trees and buildings. Nearly all are in trauma.
It seems that an international medical team has already visited three days ago but nobody knows who they were or if they are coming back. In the meantime, two of the children have contracted hepatitis and we call into TRO headquarters to start organizing a way to get the kids to the city hospital. We work through the day seeing patients. Sometime around noon, a TRO volunteers arrives on a motorcycle with packed lunches for us but the pressure is too intense for us to take a break. We have seen just over 400 patients when we finally stop.
We take our lunches into one of the small side-rooms in the school and finally eat our parcels of cold rice and curry.
Thirty minutes later we are off again, having called back to TRO to request another camp. It turns out to be in the Muslim village of Poonotchi Munai. 90 people have taken shelter in the open hall of the local mosque. There are few men here. The women dress in the bright, colorful, full-length saris, traditionally worn by all women in Sri Lanka. Only the twist of cloth at the end of the sari, wrapped around to cover their hair, reveals these women's faith.
Again, the majority of the sick are suffering respiratory infections, aggravated by the continual rain that has fallen since the tsunami and the dangerous levels of overcrowding. Many of the children have diarrhea as a result of drinking contaminated water before coming to the refugee camp but the mosque itself has purified water, thanks to daily deliveries from an international charity. We work steadily for the next few hours. Just as we are finishing, a message comes through, on one of the mobile phones, that the van is needed back in Colombo. We pack up and rattle our way back through the darkness.
Dr. Sundaralingam
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