'Walls are flecked with blood'
2005-01-05 08:32
Banda Aceh - Haggard, dehydrated tsunami survivors are flooding the disaster zone, as Sri Lankan psychologists struggle to help children cope with unspeakable tragedy and Indian officials reach out to isolated tribespeople - only to have an arrow shot toward their rescue chopper.
These are just a few of the challenges facing global relief operations following last week's earthquake-tsunami disaster that killed nearly 150 000 people and left millions in need.
Aftershocks continue to rattle the region, with another strong quake felt on Wednesday in India's Andaman Islands.
As United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and other world leaders toured the region to get a firsthand look at the damage ahead of a donor's conference on Thursday, a cargo plane hit a water buffalo on an Indonesian runway, once again showing the aid network's fragility.
No power in hospitals
The airport, vital to relief efforts in Indonesia's tsunami-battered Sumatra Island, was temporarily closed.
Helicopter pilots, however, were able to ferry survivors to medical help in Banda Aceh, the island's main city. But, that created yet another bottleneck: overcrowded hospitals.
About a dozen people lay on stretchers on the sidewalk outside Fakina Hospital in Banda Aceh, a provincial capital on Indonesia's hard-hit Sumatra Island. Many of the hospital's rooms had no power.
Walls were flecked with blood and doctors had run out of stands for intravenous fluid bags, hanging them from cords strung across the ceiling.
Leslie Ansag of Everett, Washington said: "It's heartbreaking." Everett is a Navy medic from the American aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which was off Sumatra to help the rescue effort.
In Thailand, where more than 2 200 foreign tourists were among 5 000 killed, police said they were searching for a 12-year-old Swedish boy last seen leaving a hospital with an unknown man the day after the tsunami hit.
Labour or sexual slavery
Authorities said they could not confirm media reports that Kristian Walker had been kidnapped.
The boy's grandfather, Dan Walker, begged Thai authorities to send Kristian's picture to all border patrols and airports to help prevent him from leaving the country.
Police and UN officials have expressed fears that trafficking gangs will exploit the chaos of the disaster to abduct children and sell them into forced labour or even sexual slavery.
While children who survived devastation along the Indian Ocean were already receiving makeshift help to cope with the psychological trauma of losing parents, brothers or sisters, aid agencies warned that they and other victims would need special attention for years to come.
In a psychiatric ward a Karapitiya hospital in the Sri Lankan city of Galle, an area hammered by the tsunami, some patients banged their heads against the wall.
- SAPA