Pacifists in the Cross-Fire

The Kabul Hospital That Treats All Sides

Several miles west of Kabul, the village Qala-e Naw sits deep in the barren foothills of barrener mountains that are perennially half-sunk in cloud. The ruins of old homes strafed by Soviet gunships crowd a gravel streambed that is dry most of the year but runs swiftly with snowmelt come spring. One morning early in December, a 12-year-old girl named Gulali followed the bed for almost an hour, along with her mother and little sister, in search of dry timber to fuel their stove. When they reached a steep rise with scattered saplings near its peak, Gulali scrambled up the slope and set to hacking at some of the skinnier trunks with a hatchet. In the small community of poor Pashtun farmers who inhabit Qala-e Naw, Gulali was well liked for her prideful and precocious work ethic, and true to form, when her mother said they had enough wood and it was time to go home, Gulali insisted on felling one last tree. Seconds later, she stepped on a land mine. The explosion hurled her through the air, nearly severing her right leg and pulverizing most of the left.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/magazine/the-kabul-hospital-that-treats-all-comers.html

 

Pieter Ten Hoopen/Agence Vu, for The New York Times

Abdul Latif, left, and Luca Radaelli treating a man at Emergency who stepped on a land mine.

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Gulali’s mother ran to her and began to stanch the hemorrhaging stump with a head scarf. Two of Gulali’s uncles, Pasha and Sartor, were working a field about a mile away when they heard the explosion and saw the brown plume drift and dissipate. It took Sartor, the younger one, more than 30 minutes to reach the scene, and when he arrived, he found Gulali cradled in her mother’s arms. Sartor put his niece over his shoulder and ran back to where Pasha and a group of nomadic herdsmen were waiting. An old shepherd offered his winter shawl, which Pasha and Sartor used as a makeshift litter to carry Gulali another 20 minutes to the nearest Afghan Police post. Gulali, who remained conscious the entire time, never made a sound. When she was 6, she fell down a 30-foot well that was dry at the bottom. Her father found her hours later, both of her legs broken. He had to climb down a ladder and lash her to his back with a rope to get her out. During that ordeal as well, her father told me, Gulali remained spookily calm.

Now her mother was screaming for help as they approached a metal shipping container with a machine-gunner’s nest on its roof. The police officer in charge of the post flagged down a car, put them in the back seat and instructed the driver to take them to the Emergency Surgical Center for War Victims in Kabul. “Don’t worry,” he tried to reassure Gulali’s mother. “The food and medicine are free there.”

In This Article:

• 'We Cannot be on One Side of the War'
• Triage After the Bomb
• What Do We Owe the Civilians Injured in a War We Started?  
• 'If They Wanted to Treat Them, They Could'
• The Pacifists vs. the Military
• 'A Patient is a Patient. This is Our Rule'
• A Policeman's Last Delusions
• One Remedy Among the Tragedies
• 'They're Not Like Our Children'

When they arrived at Emergency — a former kindergarten built by the Soviets — Tijana Maricic, the head nurse, rushed Gulali from the car into the operating theater, her nearly severed right leg bundled in her mother’s scarf and a huge open wound on the left. Mine injuries, especially traumatic amputations, are uniquely vulnerable to infection — the blast often forces dirt, shrapnel and other contaminants deep into the stump — and a priority for the Afghan surgeons working on Gulali was to excise foreign bodies and damaged tissue. In the end, they also had to complete the amputation of the leg, removing it just below the knee.

“She was very brave,” Maricic said of Gulali’s stoic reaction to her pain. “Here, even most of the very young children with severe injuries never cry.” Maricic, a Serb, worked as a pediatric nurse in Belgrade before joining a cardiac center run by Emergency in Sudan. Now she is one of three foreign nurses at the hospital in Kabul. Maricic and the rest of the small international staff — the nurses, one doctor and a few administrators, most of whom are in their 30s — divide their time between the hospital and a quaint house directly across the street, in Kabul’s “new city,” a lively neighborhood of butcher shops, electronics stores, kebab stands, vagrants and panhandlers.

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