Mass Response to Genocide

Fall harvest time was never very busy at Maesariang Hospital in northwestern Thailand. Patients don't want to leave their fields unless they are practically dying. Seeing some of the refugee horror stories in the Bangkok newspapers, and having time on our hands, we wrote a letter to the mission refugee committee, offering some time if they needed us. A telegram from committee member Pat Coats asked for as many as possible to come right away to work at the Cambodian border, 500 miles to the southeast.

Half the hospital wanted to go, but of course our hospital in Maesariang had to be kept running too. Five of us finally went, Rosa, a Puerto Rican nurse; Mala, a Karen nurse; Weena, a Karen aide; and my wife, Lois and myself. We got the telegram October 25 and were on our way next morning, taking the bus to Chiangmai, and the overnight train to Bangkok.

We would be on loan to CAMA services, Inc., the service arm of the Christian and Missionary Alliance mission, which has long worked in Cambodia. We drove over to their offices to meet our co-workers and learned that the Thai military had just opened a large refugee center at Sa Kaew. The International Red Cross had set up a hospital there with several hastily gathered medical teams. CAMA had a permanent medical team forming in the Netherlands, but it would not arrive for two weeks.

Some of their workers had helped in the search for refugee groups along the border near the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet,and reported thousands scattered here and there in the bush, many dying or too weak to walk. They were being moved back away from the border to cut the risk of hot pursuit into Thai territory by the advancing Vietnamese army tanks. These refugees were mostly people pressed into service by the Khmer Rouge, whose army remnants were backed up against the Cambodian forest border with Thailand. 

 

It's a three-hour drive by mini-bus from Bangkok to Sa Kaew; good highway through farm country, where the pervasive vinegar-like smell of the drying tapioca crop permeated the air. Our guide said we might as well stop at the camp before going on to our living quarters in Sa Kaew town, ten miles further on, so we pulled off on a dirt side-road, where armed guards checked all traffic, and handed out passes for those authorized to enter the camp.

Our first impression was of barbed wire and mud. The camp was only in its fourth day of operation, bulldozed out of swampy rice fields, sheltering about 30,000 black-clad people behind a fence. We had to step from grass hummock to tree root to get around. At one point, Lois had to reach elbow-deep into the mud to retrieve a shoe.

The hospital area was on slightly higher ground but otherwise chaotic. We were introduced to someone who said, “Fine, go to work in that tent over there.” We had been up since 5 am, some of the girls needed a toilet, and we hadn't even seen where we were supposed to lodge. But the word was “Work a little now, so you'll know the problems by tomorrow.”

I entered the indicated tent, where a harried-looking doctor was carrying a large cardboard box. Motionless patients lay every whichway on bamboo mats on the mud floor. We had to duck to avoid the bamboo cross-pieces in the tent frame. His box contained a jumble of paper cups of pills, syringes, bottles of liquids, bags of intravenous fluids, six-by-eight inch cards and so forth. The first thing that happened was the bottom dropped out of the box and everything slid among the patients. I went to find another box, finally dumping some bottles out of a carton I found in a supply tent. A patient needed a shot. I borrowed one from the more organized tent next door. The doctor himself had only started work that morning. Two Red Cross doctors had already quit after working only two days. He looked at another patient. “The A on his arm means he's been given ampicillin. We'll give him another shot of it now.”

“That's an every-six-hour drug,” I said, “Who gives it at night when we're gone?”

“Nobody.”

Most of my three-hour stint that afternoon was spent looking for things. The doctors in the far tent spoke French. The British lady presiding over a card table full of medicines in Tent No. 1 was having enough trouble supplying her own patients, so I hunted among the unattended supply tents. I began to get dizzy every time I stood up. The heat was oppressve, and I was wet with sweat. The other members of our team were presumably off with other doctors. Several dead bodies, rolled up in the mats on which they'd lain, were in a row between the tents. No one paid them much attention. It began to rain lightly.

At dusk, our guide found us and told us to round up and move on. I found Lois way over in the orphans' tents, following a doctor with no more idea than I where to find the medicines he was ordering. Then the word word went through the hospital, “They're unloading another convoy. Come and help!”

Out on the road we stood in back of several large Thai army trucks, helping down emaciated people who couldn't have weighed more than sixty pounds apiece. Most needed help to walk, and held on to small bundles or cooking pots. Several husky young volunteers scrambled up into the truck to hand down a half dozen people who made no effort to move. Some felt very hot to the touch. I found myself trying to hoist the mid-section of a rather large unconscious man onto a piece of cardboard. Four of us struggled through the mud to the fence and pushed apart two strands of barbed wire to hand him through to volunteers inside.

We were all bone-tired on the 10-mile ride into town. I admired the two Red Cross doctors who had managed to last two whole days. We got Chinese food at a restauurant, and finally arrived at the house rented for us by CAMA. A lady introduced herself as Winnie, and said there was plenty of bath water and clean beds ready, dormitory style. It was Winnie, and later her husband and Aree the cook, who made life possible during those next two weeks. Other teams told us later about their grungy hotel rooms and worse food, and coming home too tired to fix any dinner, but after our second day we always had a hot meal waiting.

Up next morning at sunrise. Our team leader, Bob Jono, told us we would have our own newly established tent to work in today. Remembering the disorganization of the day before, we stopped in town to buy a couple of folding card tables, plastic baskets, cups and tea kettles to carry water in, and five-gallon cans to carry it from the camp's water tanks.

We looked like we were on safari, moving through the hospital gate. On subsequent days we also carried cases of pop and big containers of crushed ice to combat the heat exhaustion we had felt the first day.

To Be Continued