N.Z. relief workers accept war’s hazards

Press, 14 August 1980, Page 20

N.Z. relief workers accept war’s hazards

By NZPA staff correspondent, BRUCE KOHN Aranyaprathet, Thailand the military situation along the eastern Thai frontier with Kampuchea is tense. But among the New Zealand relief workers helping Kampuchean refugees there is an almost fatalistic attitude to the hazards of war. “1 am not scared but we are ail very conscious of the situation,” said Judy Owen, a nurse from Wanganui Base Hospital. She and a group of other New Zealand nurses reached the medical workers’ base camp at Wattliana Nakhorn near the border just four days before Vietnamese troops overran several frontier camps.

Elizabeth Harrison, of Lower Hutt, said that when the Vietnamese began shelling the area in which she was working “we withdrew at a rapid pace.” “We could not go back into the camp at Nong Chan in which we were working for three weeks.” Miss Owen said. "In order to get on with our work, we set up a series of mobile clinics and simply treated anyone who came along and needed help.. “The refugees just get moved about like cattle. They lose the few possessions they . have, along with their medical records.

“It gets ■ pretty bad. People say, where can we go from here?” Vivienne Chapman, a public health nurse from Rotorua, said she 'was amazed at the resilience of the refugees, now believed to number up to 400,000. “They just trudge along, living for each day as it comes along. Their field and roadside shelters are made up from blue plastic ground sheets distributed by the Red Cross but these don’t keen out much rain whn the monsoon rains tumble down.

“But within three davs of the Vietnamese attack the new encampments had clusters of stalls selling cigarettes and soft-drinks and just about anything else saleable.”

Miss Chapman, a veteran of 12 months service at Qui Non in Vietnam during the American involvement there, said she had been amused to see left over front the Vietnamese attack American Army stretchers and doiichos.

“That equipment had come a long way,” she laughed. One month of her threemonth term at the border behind her. Miss Chapman said accommodation for relief workers at Watthana Nakhorn was better

than she had expected.

The Red Cross staff each have their own small bungalows with a camptype bed, electric fans, fibrolite walls, and iron roofs. They have communal showers and toilets and an open-sided camp restaurant serving Western and Thai-style meals.

The camp administrator is' a former Wellington journalsit, ' Mr. Martin O’Connor. who was brought in to the position after visiting the area on a reporting assignment.

“It is fairly basic. We have 225 huts and most times an adequate water supply and electricity system. We started off last November with tents but were able to build up the huts on a concrete base.” he said. So far 48 New Zealanders had passed through the camp since it opened late last year. The region supplying' the most relief workers was probably Scandinavia. “But given Nev/ Zealand’s small population, its record of service up here has been very good,” Mr O’Connor said.

He said the scenes in the area after the Vietnamese attack were verv bad.

‘‘There were thousands of refugees milling about the tank-trap ditch the Thais have dug. Their clothes were in rags and they just had the blue plastic sheets to huddle under. People were crying and distressed. You wonder just how much they can put up with.”

Mr O’Connor said he thought some of the malnutrition cases reaching the Non Chang camp were very . severe now. Food had apparently not reached refugees in the Kampuchean area of the town of Battambang. : “Consequently a lot of people from there have been coming down looking for food. With them are scores of extremely malnourished children, many with their thighs not much ’ thicker than an. old Kiwi penny.”

Miss Chapman said she had recently found infant twins deserted by their family. “But you cannot blame the mother. In situations like this when you have to move quickly to survive, infants like these two are just too much of a burden.

“We think they will survive with the help we are giving them.”

Other New Zealand nurses working with the International i Red Cross are Wendy Cook, of Auckland. and Helen Blakely, of Timaru. A sixth nurse, Jillian Donaldson, is recovering in Bangkok from hepatitis. The Red Cross workers do day and night shiftwork at the Nong Chan camp.

The World Vision organisation has 10 people in the area — eight nurses and two laboratory technicians. They work at the well established Khao I Dang camp farther back from the border than Nong Chan, and at Khao Two Camp, 24 to 32km from the frontier.

Miss Ruby Yee, a laboratory technician from Wellington, said she and two other New Zealand technicians did not feel frightened when the noise of Vietnamese artillery' shelling began. “But I don’t think we saw it as a situation in which we would have to go home.” Susan Hartles, a Hamilton hospital technician, said, “we had evacuation procedures ready but we did not need to use them.” Another Hamilton hospital technician, Barbara Howarth, . said the trio sought to pass on their diagnostic experience to highly educated Khmer refugees who had approached them to learn their techniques. The Hamilton pair said they had come to work under a three-month term but would stay for six months, as Miss Yee was doing. Her term expired later this month. The Red Cross and World Vision relief work-

ers agreed they had thought conditions' would •• be much worse when they arrived. “The most frus'trating thing is to under- . stand what refugees have been through,” Miss Yee said.

The work load at Khao I Dang had increased since the Vietnamese incursion. “We have been much busier than before, and pneumonia has been a serious worry.”

In contrast with the New Zealand Red Cross technicians who work in Aranyaprathet, the main border town in the area, the World Vision technicians diagnose in a thatched matting hut at Khao I. Dang. Outside, varieties of spinach and other green vegetables grow in a small garden plot.

Scattered about the hundreds of semi-permanent thatched huts and patchworks of old iron and plastic-sheeted shelters of refugees are similar plots. “We are encouraging them to grow vegetables to improve their diet,” Miss Yee said.

The camp has a well established refugee bakery. Its hot loaves of French bread are much prized by relief workers. “A lot of effort is put into encouraging model-making and cultural displays, as well as sports organisation.” While Miss Yee talked, refugee men, women and children ambled in the rolling gait of water car- ’ riers, buckets balanced on . each end of long bamboo - poles. In the scorching 30 degree heat women and children ' doused themselves with water scooped from the buckets. Midday meals were cooked in and outside huts on small bra- ? ziers.

“They are the lucky ones,” one European nurse said. “The tragedy now involves the thousands out there caught between the warriors. No-one knows what will happen to them.” "We are certainly neewed there,” -Miss Hartles said.