In northwest Pakistan, rare hope as hospital rises from ruin focus 10/04/2010

In northwest Pakistan, rare hope as hospital rises from ruin

focus

10/04/2010
NOWSHERA — When water

gushed through Nowshera hospital last month it filled operating rooms and wards, left them clogged with stinking mud and forced patients to leave, whatever their condition.

Two doctors evacuating the sick had to be airlifted to safety after getting trapped on the top floor of the district hospital, the main source of health care for 1.6 million people in Pakistan’s impoverished northwest.

“Eighty percent of the hospital staff were affected themselves. The water had destroyed their homes, cars and everything. No one was able to come to hospital,” said the hospital’s chief doctor, Muhammad Arshad.

But since the ruin, caused by monsoon-triggered floods which swept across the country, a massive volunteer undertaking has allowed the hospital to reopen, and Arshad now sits smiling on donated furniture in his freshly whitewashed office.

The walls that were blackened and buried in mud for a week are now a hygienic white, there are working heart-monitor, X-ray, ultrasound and anesthaesia machines, and the damaged water pipe has been replaced.

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Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20101004com3.html