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India's pain can only be seen in its children's eyes
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TO travel across the earthquake belt by helicopter, as I have done today, conveys the size of the catastrophe which has befallen India.
Towns like Anjar and Bhachau have simply crumbled away and the city of Bhuj is in irreparable ruins. Countless thousands of dead lie buried in the rubble, tens of thousands are homeless. But it is in a children's ward of Ahmedabad's big civilian hospital that you get an inkling of the pain this region of India is suffering after the earthquake of 10 days ago.
These children are badly traumatised and stare at strangers with such alarm in their eyes that you turn away. Several of the youngest, brought in from places like Bhuj and Bhachau, have badly crushed limbs. At the beds of these children, parents with painfully anxious faces were proffering morsels of rice from little bowls, for it was supper hour.
So much pain suddenly inflicted on very young bodies. Thank God, I thought, for the analgesics and other medicines that the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) has been rushing out to Gujarat's hospitals. In this hard-pressed hospital with 2,000 beds, 300 earthquake victims have undergone major surgery, most of them for head and spinal injuries. Of these, 50 were children.
You catch another view of the pain in remote villages hit by the earthquake, where little or no main relief has yet got through. Bakutra village in the Santalpur district, where I spent a morning, has been shaken to bits and is uninhabitable. By day, its population of a thousand roam the ruins. By night, they sleep away from the village in the open, and the nights are cold.
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