As he waits on the sun baked airport tarmac in Sichuan for the field hospital’s nearly 50 tons of equipment, medicines, tents and two 4x4 vehicles to be unloaded, German Red Cross volunteer Dr Joachim Gardemann recalls his string of emergency deployments since 1995.
“Rwanda was the worst, after the genocide, the magnitude of the violence was horrendous,” says the 53-year-old pediatrician, who, when not manning field hospitals, is a university professor in the town of Muenster.
Then it was Tanzania, dealing with the fallout from war in Congo, followed by a deployment to Macedonia during the Kosovo war and the aftermath of massive earthquakes in Turkey and Iran.
“The huge difference here is the amount of support we’re getting from the Chinese, ” says Marianne Knirsch, one of a two-member advance team, as her colleagues – doctors, , nurses and technicians – set up the field hospital along a blocked-off roadway near China’s earthquake-battered city of Dujiangyan.
This deployment breaks new ground in that unlike past missions, the German team is minimal, with only two doctors and a handful of nurses and technicians. The Red Cross Society of China has sent an English-speaking medical team from one of the country’s most advanced hospitals in Shanghai and doctors from the local People’s Hospital are also going to be working closely with the German team.
“It’s an unusual situation in that the local hospitals are virtually out of action after the earthquake; they are working out of tents because the buildings are unsafe and they’re unable to treat inpatient cases,” says Ms Knirsch.
But China has a plentiful supply of doctors and nurses, who will take over the running of the hospital as soon as possible.
“I felt very moved when I saw all this equipment arriving,” says local volunteer Zita Shui. Her mother is a doctor, so she’s heard from close quarters how badly impacted local medical infrastructure has been.
At the moment, local hospitals have to refer virtually all the cases that need inpatient treatment to the provincial capital Chengdu.
The Hong Kong Red Cross is also working to set up at least two small scale temporary hospitals in order to help improve the situation.
Still, the airport and train station in Chengdu are seeing a constant stream of ambulance convoys, transporting seriously injured earthquake survivors for treatment in other provinces.
It’s not yet clear how long the field hospital will be needed for. In the past, says Dr. Gardemann “these hospitals have provided an example of the Red Cross Red Crescent working at its best.”
In 1999, the German Red Cross handed over a field hospital to the Macedonian national society, which Macedonia passed on to Turkey, following a massive earthquake there and the Turkish Red Crescent then gave to its Iranian counterpart after the 2003 Bam earthquake.
“So it stayed in the family.”
Whether the Red Cross Society of China will continue to need it in times of domestic disaster, or will be able to pass it on to another Red Cross or Red Crescent society is of course much too early to predict.
“We are likely to need it for quite some time,” says one senior Red Cross official.
But whatever happens, the German field hospital’s deployment, just beginning in the Sichuan earthquake zone, will help people until a more permanent solution is in place and then move on to help in the next disaster, in China or beyond.
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“Rwanda was the worst, after the genocide, the magnitude of the violence was horrendous,” says the 53-year-old pediatrician, Dr Joachim Gardemann. (p17690)
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4x4 German Red Cross vehicle being unloaded. (p17690)
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“The huge difference here is the amount of support we’re getting from the Chinese, ” says Marianne Knirsch, one of a two-member advance team, as her colleagues – doctors, , nurses and technicians – set up the field hospital along a blocked-off roadway near China’s earthquake-battered city of Dujiangyan. (p17694)
“I felt very moved when I saw all this equipment arriving,” says local volunteer Zita Shui. Her mother is a doctor, so she’s heard from close quarters how badly impacted local medical infrastructure has been. (p17691)
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