“Working
in Africa is never boring,” says Luce Sicotte, a French-Canadian
nurse at the medical centre in the Red Cross camp for Sudanese
refugees in Tréguine, eastern Chad.
At the team meeting at half past six in the morning, it is quite
clear once again that the day will be tedious for no one.
On the agenda for the day: transferring refugees from neighbouring
Breijing camp and settling them into Tréguine; distributing
food and non-food aid to those already installed in the camp;
receiving several truckloads of supplies and equipment from
a British Red Cross aid flight; and, of course, solving the
multitude of unforeseen problems that will occur in the process.
“We all know what to do,” concludes camp manager
Langdon Greenhalgh. “Now let’s go out and do it!”
As the team disperses to their various tasks, four Chad Red
Cross trucks drive off to Breijing with a complex and delicate
mission: moving several hundred refugees, mostly women and children
with luggage and supplies, along the short distance to the Red
Cross camp at Tréguine.
By the time the convoy arrives, a large crowd has already gathered.
Friends and relatives of the refugees moving today have come
to see them off, and help with their bags, cartons, and bundles
of wood.
Officials from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the Chad government
tick the passengers’ names off the manifests drawn up
previously. Children look on in amazement at so much inexplicable
activity.
Ahmat Mahamat Zene, who oversees the registration process for
the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies,
is called aside for an emergency. A woman who gave birth the
day before is due to be transferred, but is still too weak to
make the trip on the back of a truck.
He takes her and her newborn baby to Tréguine on board
a Land Cruiser and hands them over to a Red Cross volunteer
who will see them to their tent.
On his way, he passes Dr Thomas Peuckert in the medical centre
run by the German Red Cross, as he rushes off to assist the
nurse in installing a drip on a one year old boy. The child
is severely dehydrated, and it is difficult to find a vein to
stick the needle in.
After several attempts, they are finally successful. Thomas’s
diagnostic is not encouraging: apart from the dehydration, he
is suffering from malaria.
“We gave him anti-malaria pills,” his mother explains.
“But he has been vomiting them.”
An hour later, the boy is already better, and he is taken off
the drip and given water by mouth. Two hours later he is given
treatment for malaria, which he manages to hold down. The mother
and her boy are discharged in the afternoon, after receiving
basic health awareness training.
A noise comes from the maternity tent as a pregnant woman is
carried in on a stretcher. “She has been lying down for
three months, too weak to move,” her husband tells the
midwife from the Chad Red Cross.
Her face drops as she examines the woman: she is badly anaemic,
and has not felt the baby move for several weeks now. The nurses
fear it may already be dead. There is a moment’s hesitation
as the medical team decides whether to evacuate her to the hospital
in Adré, several rough hours’ drive away.
Finally, they agree the trip would make things worse and prepare
to treat her in Tréguine. Dr Razack Akadiri, the Red
Cross gynaecologist, will be here tomorrow to examine her.
After the bustle of the medical centre, the calm and quiet atmosphere
that reigns over the distribution area just a hundred metres
away is almost an anti-climax. This is the very first distribution
in the new camp, which opened only last week, but the process
is managed smoothly by volunteers from the Chad Red Cross.
Three sections of the camp are due to receive one month’s
worth of corn soya blend, millet, vegetables, sugar, salt and
oil from the World Food Programme (WFP), as well as kitchen
sets, soap and buckets.
“We started late today because we wanted to get the process
right from the beginning,” says Greenhalgh as the refugees
are called up to collect their rations. “This is often
a tense moment in the life of a camp, but now everything is
working out perfectly.”
As the sun sets in soothing shades of orange, the delegates
return to the base for a cold drink, and reflect on the day
that has flown by. On Wednesday 6 October, 630 refugees were
transferred to the camp, 523 received food and non-food items,
94 were given medical attention.
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Tréguine
camp will eventually be home to some 15,000 Sudanese refugees
(p12100)
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Refugees
prepare to board the Red Cross trucks that will take the
from the camp at Breijing to their new home at Tréguine
(p12102)
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All
hands on deck to help putting a dehydrated one-year-old
baby on a drip (p12104)
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German
Red Cross doctor Thomas Peuckert examines a young boy
who displays all the symptoms of malaria (p12103)
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Chad
Red Cross volunteers measure out a family's monthly ration
of corn soya blend (p12105)
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