Eleven year old Mitesh was at the local
market in his home town of Bhachau on the morning of January 26, when the
earthquake struck India's western state of Gujarat. Four hours later, he
was pulled out from under a pile of debris, after his parents had rushed
to the scene and raised the alarm.
Now Mitesh is lying in a bed in the
newly-opened Spanish Red Cross mobile clinic in Bhachau, awaiting news
of what will happen to him next. His leg was badly broken and hadn't been
set properly. Doctors at the clinic, which had opened just two days before,
have a decision to make: to try and treat him there or send him to the
Red Cross field hospital for a possible operation.
"We don't know how we survived," says Mitesh's mother Jayshree. "Our house collapsed and those of our neighbours fell on top of ours, too. But our first thought was for Mitesh." In another tent ward, a doctor is treating an elderly lady. She is the aunt of Malaji Malavakehla, one of the many volunteers who helped set up the clinic.
The Spanish Red Cross clinic, which has an out-patients' service and a pharmacy, has treated nearly 100 people since it opened, most of them earthquake victims and could - if needed - see up to 200 people a day.
"People are beginning to come in slowly, but once we are fully established, we'll go out and do an assessment in the villages around Bhachau, where we think the medical situation is worse," says Pilar Cirugeda, a Spanish Red Cross health advisor from Madrid.
The Spanish Red Cross team at the clinic comprises nine people and is currently being reinforced by volunteer doctors and nurses from a catholic order, the Sisters of Charity of St Anne, from the town of Baroda in Gujarat.
The Spanish Red Cross had carefully assessed the location of their mobile clinic, one of many Red Cross emergency response units operating in the disaster zone and opted for Bhachau because of the sheer devastation in the town. "Living conditions in this area is among the worst we have seen," says Vicente Sanchez Brunete, the Spanish Red Cross medical coordinator at the clinic. "There is nothing left of the structure of the town and no sewage system."
Almost 100 kilometres away from the epicentre of the earthquake, Bhachau was left with barely a building standing and one of the highest death tolls. There is a Ukrainian army hospital in the town, but it will be packing up and leaving shortly. The Spanish mobile clinic will coordinate the transfer of its in-patients to the Red Cross field hospital in Bhuj. It will also refer patients in serious conditions to the Bhuj hospital.
In the end, the Spanish doctors decide that Mitesh will have to be referred to the Red Cross hospital in Bhuj for the treatment he needs. It is an emotional upheaval for his parents who have another five children at home, but they grab whatever they can and set off wit their son in a Red Cross vehicle.