World Vision has made its first delivery
of humanitarian aid inside Iraq rushing medicines and relief supplies to
a desert town whose hospital was completely destroyed during the first
few days of the war.
A team of three World Vision relief
staff handed over US$11,000 worth of medical supplies, blankets, plastic
sheeting and jerry cans to doctors at Al Rutba Hospital, 130km inside Iraq.
Until World Vision's delivery, the hospital had run out of painkillers. They are vitally important as increasing numbers of children are suffering from blast wounds received while playing with abandoned Iraqi weaponry.
The delivery was followed up by a two-day rapid assessment of the sheep and truck-stop-town to find out how World Vision can help out.
Doctors are looking at converting the former headquarters of the Baath Party into a temporary facility to create a unit with 20-beds. World Vision will assist.
The pick-up truck of medical and relief aid was handed over earlier this week after a seven-hour journey from World Vision's base in Amman, Jordan, across the border and through the flat Badyat Ash Sham Desert.
The area is still considered somewhat insecure and the road in is largely unpoliced.
This was World Vision's first aid delivery inside Iraq, other operations having assisted refugees who had fled to Syria and Jordan.
Al Rutba, a poor town anyway, is still reeling from the war, the bombing of essential facilities and from the collapse of the regime which has left it largely without power, water and communications.
Garbage is rotting in the street, the town's 12 schools have yet to reopen and have been looted of virtually everything, while the town's main 50-bed hospital was completely smashed by a US strike during the first few days of the war.
That attack left two dead while hospital doctors lost all the district's patient records, medical equipment and the operating theatre, forcing hospital staff to set up a makeshift hospital at a nearby primary health care clinic.
With power out, the hospital has to rely on expensive benzene generated electricity to keep a single refrigerator for drugs going and to drive the sterilizing unit.
The hospital receives all its water by tanker and this must then be boiled to sanitize it. There is no water to flush the filthy toilets where excrement is piling up.
Resident doctor, Dr Bassam Jamel said unlike the former 50-bed hospital, the temporary hospital had no in-patient beds. The four male and two female beds could only be used during hospital open hours. Patients who were seriously ill or who needed surgery had to be transferred by ambulance to Ar Ramadi Hospital 300 km away.
The destruction of the hospital has meant the town's doctors are now looking to refit the Baath Party building down the road to create a temporary hospital.
Before the collapse of the regime this building oversaw Al Rutba, a town of some 25,000.
The World Vision relief team will now hope to use some of a US$5m Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID) grant awarded to World Vision for projects like this.