Reaching out to aid villagers

By Flt-Lt Trevor Grant

IT’S 8.30 on a chilly and gusty Friday morning and two Black Hawks arrive to take an Australian medical team to the village of Bailgiran, more than 1500m up in the mountains of the Neelum Valley.

They are involved in Operation Longreach – part of Operation Pakistan Assist – a program designed to take medical personnel from Camp Bradman, near Dhanni, to provide humanitarian medical aid to those people unable to make the journey down to the camp, some two hours’ walk on narrow mountainous tracks prone to landslides.

From the air, the medical teams can see the devastation caused by the earthquake which claimed the lives of so many people. In Bailgiran alone, a small village high in the mountains of the Neelum Valley, some 300 people lost their lives.

The teams set up a 14x14 tent and immediately start treating villagers, some who have walked for several hours from outlying villages.

The queue of patients soon swells to more than 150 people as parents bring their children for vaccinations. “It’s really amazing to see so many children lined up,” said Pte Sheyna Veal, the medic providing vaccinations. “It’s hard work with a constant stream of children of all ages coming through.”

Inside the makeshift clinic, the doctor and medics treat a procession of patients with conditions varying from skin diseases to upper respiratory tract infections.

“What we are doing here in places like Bailgiran is providing basic medical care,” said Maj Raffaele Scicchitano, the doctor in the team. “The work that the team is doing is important for the people and really rewarding for us knowing that we are helping these people as much as we are”.

In the five hours on the ground in Bailgiran, the medical teams see more than 100 patients and administer 160 vaccinations.
A few weeks earlier four medical personnel had visited another earthquake-ravaged village, Qaziabad, situated at a height of more than 1900m, and treated 42 patients in four hours.

The villagers are living in tents or homemade shelters of canvas and corrugated iron along ridgelines and on the side of the mountain.

Despite their situation, their spirits are high and they welcomed the team with beaming smiles and many handshakes.