Mehdia, 4, who lost fingers and suffered serious abdomen injuries after finding unexploded ordnance. She is watched over by her Aunt.
From Lucy’s witness: “Treating children who have picked up something shiny while playing and then it has exploded in their hands, causing traumatic amputations or loss of their sight, is not uncommon. Children like Mehdia who was brought to the hospital after finding an unexploded ordnance and who lost several fingers and had to have a skin graft. The only time I witnessed her crying was when she was undergoing her first dressing of the skin graft.”
The number of children who, like Mehdia, get severely injured by the explosion of landmines is extremely high in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, due to the lack of resources and infrastructures not all of them make it through recovery. From the beginning of EMERGENCY’s work in Afghanistan 587.730 children have been treated in our hospitals for free.
In 2001, EMERGENCY opened a second Surgical Centre in Kabul, renovating and expanding a former nursery school which had previously been hit by a rocket that killed five children in the centre of the capital. In August 2003, a 6-bed intensive care unit was set up. In 2005, a device for computerized tomography (CT) was installed; it is still the only free-of-charge one in Afghanistan. The Centre is also specialized in trauma surgery. However, since July 2010 the admission criteria have been restricted to war surgery only, in order to meet the needs of the increase of injured patients. The Kabul Surgical Centre is linked to 9 of EMERGENCY’s First Aid Posts and Health Centres in the provinces of Kabul, Parwan, Logar, and Ghazni.
Data on the EMERGENCY Surgical Centre in Kabul:
Outpatients consultation: 82,038
Admitted patients: 27,536
Surgeries: 34,874
Since December 1999 EMERGENCY has treated over 3.5 million people in Afghanistan.
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