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Orphans bear brunt of trauma
28/05/2003 11:49 - (SA)
Algiers - "I was eating ice cream and a black car hit us."
That's how eight-year-old Hassiba Yazi remembers the moment the earthquake struck a week ago, and it has become something of a mantra.
Hassiba, rescued last Friday after spending about 40 hours pinned under the rubble of her building, lost her right forearm in the ordeal and is now among dozens of Algeria's earthquake orphans.
It is far too early to expect an exact figure, but Hassiba was one of 80 children admitted to the main pediatric unit in eastern Algiers when she had surgery to stabilise the stub of her right arm - her writing arm.
Hassiba also has a black eye, a broken leg and assorted cuts and bruises, but can manage a smile now in her hospital bed loaded with cuddly toys, where her aunts and an uncle are visiting, along with the man who saved her life, a boyhood friend of her dead father.
Her aunts and uncle are hoping to evacuate her to Spain or France, where she has relatives and may be able to get a mechanical hand, they said.
And as for the girl's emotional recovery? ]
"We don't really have the structure to treat psychological trauma" in Algeria, the hospital's public liaison officer said, noting that just learning about the disaster can be traumatic for children.
She said her seven-year-old daughter Fella asked her after the quake, "What have we done wrong for God to punish us?"
These are the kinds of questions children ask in the universal language of trauma.
Of course Algerians of all ages are traumatised - the relatives, friends and neighbours of the more than 2 000 dead, the thousands of newly homeless, those who fear their buildings will give in to the next aftershock - as several did on Tuesday, when a strong aftershock again struck the region.
The effects even showed in a pet dog at a tent camp in Boumerdes, hardest hit by the quake with more half the death toll, whose owner says his once cheerful companion has turned nervous and aggressive.
A nurse at Hassiba's hospital described the complex set of factors contributing to the post-traumatic stress as a "labyrinth".
But in a disaster of this scale, with resources woefully overstretched, children are the priority for the few available psychologists, said Reda Mohand-Amer, an emergency relief officer at a tent camp in an eastern Algiers suburb.
One tent has been set up specifically for newly homeless children, who are encouraged to spill their feelings out using colored pencils on paper.
Most of the drawings are of houses - nice country dwellings that they recall from summer camp, not the apartment blocks where they used to live.
"The priority in their mind is a home," a volunteer therapist said.
An 11-year-old's drawing did have tall buildings, one fallen flat on its back, with a wiggly line along the horizon to suggest an earthquake.
A five-year-old drew what he called a monster, just a pair of scary looking eyes, a nose and a mouth.
The camp was sheltering several orphans, including survivors of a family of 10 whose main breadwinner, now dead, was the father, a night watchman.
These children, ranging in age from two to 19, were more subdued, grieving for their parents and their baby brother, a three-month-old who died in his mother's arms.
A cousin said the family was large because the mother had kept trying to have boys, and finally succeeded with the last three.
Tahib Djamila, also volunteering at the camp, is a teacher with degree in psychology.
"At first they were withdrawn, but last night they even managed to sing a bit," she said.
The children's six-year-old sister Khoula, recovering in hospital with a fractured skull, has still not been told she is an orphan. - Sapa-AFP
- SAPA
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