Mass Response to Genocide part 2

The dead bodies were still there or, more probably, new ones. What struck us most about the hospital was the lack of conversational background noise. Just coughing, in a constant undercurrent.

Our new tent, Ward 8 (someone later altered the numeral to depict a snowman-like figure gripping his belly) was ninety feet long and twenty feet wide, open sided, with 150 sick human beings, everyone crowded in at random, lying on bamboo mats on the ground. About fifteen more outside the far end of the tent were under lean-tos of plastic and sticks. Some had tags noting treatment given at the Thai border; others had letters inked on their arms standing for medicines they had received; Q for quinine, F for fansidar (another anti-malaria drug). We had no idea what some of the other letters meant. We had no translator the first couple of days, and the patients spoke only Khmer.

If any of them had education, they weren't about to let the Khmer Rouge soldiers among them know about it. It is said that Pol Pot's government summarily shot anyone wearing eyeglasses. The Khmer Rouge's brave new world had no use for any schooling other than their own indoctrination. Those first few days, no refugee wanted to call attention to himself by being the first to do anything.

Lois and I, with a clipboard and basket of medicines, started on the nearest patient. We marked a number 1 on her arm, listened to her chest, felt her abdomen. Started her on

anti -malaria treatment, B-complex for beri-beri, and iron for anemia, made a note on the clip-board, and moved on.

Patient number 4 had diarrhea. There were no bedpans. Those patients who were strong enough crawled to the 8-inch-deep latrine ditch at the edge of the tent. Weaker ones lay where they were. There were no clean clothes to change into; that first day there wasn't even a rag to wash them with. We found some old newspapers to put under her, gave her paregoric and an antibiotic, started a bottle of intravenous fluid, hanging the bottle from the tent frame on a bent piece of wire.

We moved slowly on down the tent. Some had massive swelling of their legs and bellies from protein deficiency; many were burning with fever. Many were pale from severe anemia, or too weak to stand, from lack of vitamin B. Both the Khmer (Cambodian) and Vietnamese armies, seeking to win their war at any cost, destroyed each others farm crops. Many of these people had had nothing to eat for months, except leaves from the trees in their forest refuge; no protection from malarial mosqitoes and other jungle fevers. Several had deep ulcers, bed sores from lying for days in one position out in the jungle. Many children lay listlessly, or having a futile try at their mother's dried up breasts. Children and some adults had arms and legs not much bigger around than my thumb.

      I felt a dull, bitter anger inside me toward leaders who make war and make other people pay the price. But mostly there was only time for squatting down again to listen to another chest, feel another abdomen, start another IV bottle. My muscles ached with the constant bending, kneeling, and stooping. We drank quarts to replace the sweat. On later days we ate all the lunch that Winnie and Aree packed for us, but that first day the scene was all too new for us, we weren't hungry. Somewhere in that day, an American Embassy doctor pitched in and helped; but by sunset, when it was time to go, we still hadn't seen everybody.

      Bob Jono and I had to stay after dark to attend the nightly staff meeting, where the day's problems were ironed out. When I learned that each group had to provide a doctor and nurse every five days to cover the whole 1,200-bed hospital from 6 pm to 8 am, I thought I'm finally getting too old to take it anymore! We got back to town about 7:30, ate supper and fell into bed.

But as we weathered he first few days, things got better. We got a small tent to keep our medicines and eat our lunch. We built up our stock of medicines, and what we didn't have we knew where we could trade. Bob found us a refugee who spoke fluent Thai and a little English, and we could finally communicate with our patients instead of practicing veterinary medicine. Weena mass-produced a gruel of milk and protein food made by Thailand's Kasetsart University and passed it around, a cupful to each patient twice a day, to supplement the food from the camp kitchen. We got so we could finish morning rounds by 3 pm, and one afternoon we cleaned out the dirtiest mats and had the patients lie in three rows, with space to walk between. We discharged enough healed patients into the larger camp (now numbering 35,000), bringing our tent's count down to 100, and moved all the outside patients in under the tent. We shared medicines and nurses with tent 9 next door, where a couple of American doctors on loan from some research group were getting acquainted with clinical medicine.

      And the tent grew noisier. People had enough strength to talk now, and sometimes even smile. One little girl with diarrhea and pneumonia and no family to look after her, whom we left each night not expecting her to survive till morning, sat up one day and began shouting something. Tann, our translator, grinned and explained, “She' s saying she doesn't want that old soup, she wants a fish!” We not only found her that, but a banana too.

Excitement broke out at the far end of the tent one afternoon. A girl who had been separated from her family a year ago suddenly spotted her father and sister walking by outside.

      There were discouraging things too. People who couldn't be persuaded to eat, the comatose who sank lower and lower and quietly died a few days after reaching camp. (Miserable as the camp was at first, it was a big step up from starving unattended in the hills.) Our ward averaged about one death a day now, as did other wards. The record for the whole hospital and camp was 42 deaths in a single day.

      We got to know many of our patients after a fashion. (Asking their personal history was taboo; there were still Khmer Rouge agents among them.) There was the mother who hated shots more than her three kids did. The one-legged man on crutches who led his blind friend with a stick. The young man with TB. The comatose girl with cerebral malaria who developed a bed sore overnight when there was no one to turn her. The old man with gradually healing leg sores.

In our second week there, an Israeli team arrived to take over the tent next door from the departing American researchers. Wearing green scrubs emblazoned with a red star of David, they soon developed a receiving ward and accepted all new hospital patients around the clock for emergency treatment before distribution to other wards. The Israelis were a friendly bunch, but we were embarrassed to have only ham sandwiches to share the day they arrived.

      The hospital as a whole, now down to 1,000 patients was under the joint direction of the International and Thai Red Cross, but we other groups operated under them almost independently: the French “Medicin Sans Frontiers”, World Vision, C&MA (us), and the Israelis. A group of Catholic sisters took care of about 400 orphans; a German doctor had a special nutrition unit, and a lab technician from somewhere opened up a blood bank. He drew blood from the many visitors to the camp and split each unit into two two half pints. (When your hemoglobin is down to 2 grams, even half a unit of blood can double it. The French unit delivered two or three babies a day. Even at full term, they mostly weighed only 3 or 4 pounds.
     to be continued . . .