Mission to Somalia Poses Danger for Relief Worker : Famine: Neil Frame will take medical supplies gathered by a Westside agency to field hospitals in the war-torn African nation.

Somalia is not for the faint of heart.

“One relief worker told me that his enduring image of Somalia is a 12-year-old kid carrying an AK-47, chewing qat and popping Valium,” said Neil Frame, procurement director of the Los Angeles-based Operation U.S.A. Frame, who left for Somalia last week, has worked for the relief agency for 13 years.

“He said it’s just like (the road-warrior movie) ‘Mad Max.’ One of the side effects of qat (a plant chewed for its stimulant effect) . . . is paranoia. What’s more frightening than someone who’s paranoid with a gun?”

Before he left for Somalia, Frame told of being shot at in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as a journalist and, later, as a relief worker in Central America and the Philippines. But, he said, the East African country is among the most chaotic and life-threatening places to which he will have ventured. The photographs of skeletal-thin Somali babies and Somali men with legs blown off in Operation U.S.A.’s office on Melrose Avenue are a wordless argument for Frame’s trip to the war-torn region.

Despite concerns for his safety, Frame boarded his flight to Nairobi on Wednesday with the object of linking up with 11,000 pounds of medical supplies sent there earlier and taking it, with American military assistance, to field hospitals in Somalia.

Operation U.S.A., a nonprofit relief organization that has been in existence since 1979, will be sending an additional 27,000 pounds of medical supplies, a mere dent in what is needed to abate the infection and disease Frame said exceed starvation as the No. 1 cause of death in the feeding camps.

The $335,000 worth of medical supplies were donated by American corporations, private donors and hospitals--about 10% as much as relief agencies garnered for the Ethiopian famine in 1985-86, said Richard Walden, president of Operation U.S.A. Walden thinks that donors were put off by the perception that donations of food and supplies were being hijacked by warring clansmen. Once the American military arrived in Somalia, Walden said, donations increased.

Other organizations have sent medical supplies, including the American Red Cross, which sent its first shipment of medical supplies--about $45,000 worth--in July, and the Los Angeles-based Somali Relief and Rehabilitation Assn., which sent $15,000 worth of medical supplies in December. Still, the need is greater than the supply, Frame said.

“Statistically, a quarter of all Somali children have died,” Frame said, adding that of the 300,000 Somalis who have already perished, 150,000 were children.

“Out of a population of 6 million, about 2 million were at risk of dying of starvation when the American Marines arrived. But now, the greatest risk of death is by disease,” Frame said.

The relief agency, which has sent aid to 47 countries, has been working with International Medical Corps, a Marina del Rey-based organization of mostly American doctors and nurses who have been working in Somalia’s field hospitals. IMC doctors and nurses alerted Operation U.S.A. to their dire need for medical supplies nearly a year ago, saying that in addition to death by starvation, children were dying at frightening rates from tuberculosis, polio, meningitis, encephalitis and post-operative infections.

In the last year, Frame said, IMC medical teams have stayed in Mogadishu during the worst bouts of fighting.

“They told us they were doing about 200 surgeries a week without anesthesia, standing in pools of blood and operating on low supplies because of the danger of bringing in large amounts of medical supplies that could be hijacked,” Frame said. “We made a decision to help them out because they hung in there through the worst of it.

“We’ve even had requests from them to bring rags and bleach because they have been wiping up the floors with sterile bandages. They’ve had a lot of orthopedic wounds because the Somali custom is to shoot at and shatter bones.”

Getting shot at by gun-toting Somalis is perhaps Frame’s greatest risk, one he is not taking lightly.

“The doctors in Somalia were doing surgeries with flak jackets on and they do have a supply of them,” Frame said. “I plan on getting one.”

Although the relief agency has sent two shipments of medical supplies to Somalia over the last year, Walden said other shipments were precluded by a lack of military support for flights to Africa.

“Our big problem was getting military support to fly the supplies over, but the military just hasn’t supplied any logistic security support, and there are no American airlines flying to the whole African continent right now because of airlines going out of business and mergers,” he said.

“You have to use government-owned airlines,” he added. “We paid to have this shipment taken over by a Dutch airline with an air freight (bill) of $21,400. It’s frustrating because there is all this extra space on military aircraft, but they won’t let humanitarian groups use it.

“We went all the way to the top to (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen.) Colin L. Powell and (President) Bush, and they were all very sympathetic, but nothing has been done.”

If the government has failed the relief agency, local hospitals have not.

David Langness, spokesperson for the 230-member Hospital Council of California, said he was able to get medical supplies from St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, Kaiser Permanente Medical Care centers and other Southland hospitals.

“The photo that enraged me the most,” Langness said, “was one in the press of a 3-year-old child being operated on for a bullet wound with no anesthesia. There is no reason for that.

“I had suggested to Operation U.S.A. several months ago that hospitals really wanted to help and that medical supplies were more needed than food because medical needs were going underreported. No one was airlifting medical supplies. Hospitals here responded. Some gave cash and others, supplies.”

Frame said preparation for the trip was psychological as well as physical. He had taken five shots one recent morning, and a note taped to his door reminded him to take his typhoid pill. But for Dengue fever, a mosquito-borne virus informally known as “break bone fever” because it feels as if bones are breaking, there is no preventive measure and no cure.

But that’s just sweating the small stuff, Frame said.

“I’ve been told there are a number of things to leave at home,” he said. “One is your Banana Republic cameraman vest; that’s a hit target. I’ve noticed all the newsmen are wearing T-shirts instead.

“Another is the desire to test your manhood,” he added. “We were told that a UNICEF guy that was killed was saying negative things about one of the warlords and that they shot him twice in the buttocks and once in the back of the head.

“That is in keeping with the traditional Somali execution style, adding insult to injury, as is apropos with shooting at the bones. I don’t know, I hope caution is enough.”