At Hospital, Staff’s Needs Come First

Well fed and well dressed, Dr. Saber Joda walked out of Basra General Hospital on Wednesday carrying home a large shopping bag filled with humanitarian aid sent from the United Arab Emirates.

The aid had been delivered to the hospital in this southern city for the first time since the war, and as Joda and other members of the staff hauled bags and boxes emblazoned with Red Crescent stickers, some were besieged by furious relatives of the sick.

Abdur Hamad, 32, was seething. “They distributed the aid only to the doctors and hospital staff. Sick people have no water to drink,” he complained, gesticulating angrily. “Everything is as it was before under Saddam Hussein. The food is going to people with high positions, and that’s all.”

Suddenly, he spotted a hospital staffer laden with two shopping bags filled with milk, biscuits, water and other aid items.

“Look at her!” he shouted, then confronted her angrily. “Why do sick people have no water when you are taking it?”

“It’s only for staff. I’m taking it home,” responded Hayfa Lateef, 32. “They gave it to me. What should I do? Throw it away?” She said she had not been paid this month.

Joda, the director of general surgery at the hospital, said salaries had not been paid for three months. As a group of patients’ relatives surrounded him in the parking lot, he handed his bag of Red Crescent biscuits to a colleague and shooed him away. Then the doctor planted his feet on the concrete and listed all the problems he and his staff face: The hospital was suffering severe shortages, including water, food, medicine and dressings.

“We have no clean water to sterilize our hands or equipment,” he said. “Of course people are going to get infections. What do you expect?”

He defended the decision to hand out bottled water and food to staff members, citing the lack of pay. Although he seemed nonplused when asked why needy patients didn’t get the aid first, he recovered quickly, saying that was someone else’s decision.

But the head of the hospital kitchen, Thaera Hashem, 42, hauling home a box of bottled water on her shoulder, said it was Joda’s decision. A group of staff members walking out with her all agreed.

Inside, the hospital’s wards were a chaotic picture of wrenching misery: People lay injured from allied bombing and artillery strikes on Basra and the surrounding area. None of them had been given Red Crescent milk, food or water.

“The plane came and attacked with bombs,” said Nasera Farhan, 10. “It hurts a lot.” She recalled running in panic from the roof of her family’s house in the village of Omara.

The wall collapsed and crushed her leg. Her mother, Fatima, standing barefoot by the bed, fanned the listless child. She buys tomatoes and vegetables for her, and said she had to buy medicine as well.

She slapped her hands together in a dismissive gesture to express the hopelessness of efforts to get humanitarian aid for her child. She said she has to line up for water from Kuwait being distributed in tankers.

A young woman in a nearby bed began crying and moaning. Her family fluttered anxiously, and everyone cast looks of pained sympathy. Under her bed lay a bloodstained towel.

In another bed, Basem Faves, 15, had a gash in his stomach about a foot long. He said he’d been shot in the stomach by a British tank.

“It was a big tank. I was standing outside my house and suddenly I was shot. I fell down,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t really feel anything.”

His brother Habeeb, 33, said he and others had asked staff for aid, to be told patients would get it the next day. But the aid had run out, he said.

In the next bed lay a frail boy named Abass Kadem, 13, with stomach and back injuries, hurt when artillery hit his house. He has had two operations, but his father has been told they were not successful.

“We’re waiting for the food aid that they promised,” said his father, Harda Kadem, 52, referring to allied forces.

Zaidoon Dahoos, a surgeon, said he had heard that some doctors were given aid but that he had not received any. “It’s supposed to be distributed to the sick people,” he said. “There are always some bad people. They have a good chance to get something.”