PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

Well, here’s a new one: Chile is preventing medical aid teams, including the field hospitals it requested, from operating in Chile until they have a certificate. How do you get one? You have to coordinate with the national health service in Chile. So, you sit somewhere and wait to see if you can do the job you came to do. Some have been sitting around for days.

Here is a clip from an AP story:

“...most of the foreign units weren't treating anyone a week after the disaster. Chile insisted donor nations first figure out how to coordinate with Chile's advanced, if wounded, public health system.

Luis Ojeda, a Spanish doctor working with Doctors Without Borders, said his team arrived Monday but was still waiting for Chile's instructions on where to deploy.

"This country is atypical," Ojeda said, adding he'd spent his time checking on the displaced in tent camps.

Chile signed an operating agreement for a U.S. field hospital Friday, enabling 57 U.S. military personnel to work side-by-side with civilian Chilean doctors in coming days to support a population of 3,000 in the town of Angol. In Rancagua, a Cuban field hospital was fully operational.

Field hospitals being provided by Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Peru, Spain and the U.S. are meant to relieve 36 heavily damaged or destroyed Chilean hospitals, including Santiago's now-closed 522-bed Felix Bulnes Hospital. Brazil's emergency field hospital was sent to western Santiago to pick up the slack.”

TERRYREPORT COMMENT:

On a certain level, all of this makes sense. There is an obvious need to know where aid is going, who is offering it and to avoid duplication. The idea, however, that people are sitting around on their hands for four, five or six days seems insane.

These kinds of bureaucratic problems are one reason that people who are relief professionals go slowly nuts. They work and prepare for years to be of service in a major disaster, then they get stopped from carrying out their mission while other people. paper pushers, try to figure out what to do with them. Meanwhile, the people they traveled thousands of miles to help suffer day after day.

2.6.10

CONTACT THE TERRYREPORT

       HOME PAGE

end