Camp Hero, Revisited

Kandahar, Afghanistan

I have received several boxes of toys for children recently, I believe inspired by the Princess of the ICU, our little Jane Doe.  We have a large cache of toys in the ICU but we were starting to encroach on storage space for our equipment and medical supplies.  So one of our senior nurses loaded up the boxes of toys in a hospital crib, and stowed it in the morgue.  Yes, the morgue.  So I felt compelled to get these toys out to the community, pronto.

Today I went with one of our translators on a mission back to Camp Hero to see if we could distribute the morgue-toys.  We loaded up one of their Land Rovers with many of these boxes, as well as some clothes that some others had collected.  We drove through the entry control point, past a line of semi's and trucks, perhaps a hundred deep.  They wait, sometime for days, to get clearance to come through the inner wire and onto post.

We stopped first at a forward operating base about 2 miles outside the inner wire where we dropped off the clothes and half of the toys.  They are now bound for a homeless shelter in Kandahar City.  Our translator has "adopted" a few homeless shelters and supplies them with food and clothes - and now toys - every month or so.  He says the kids will be thrilled - most of them have never seen a toy.

We then meandered through a few more entry control points on our way to Camp Hero.  Once at Hero we found several waiting children who are now the proud owners of matchbox car sets and Dora the Explorer dolls.  The boxes we had brought also had Hannah Montana paraphernalia, various cartoon character masks and dolls, and so forth.  It was a bit incongruous, the realization that they have no idea who Raggedy Anne is, much less Hannah Montana.  It just didn't seem to matter.

We visited a young boy, whom I had met on my previous visit.  He was burned in a horrible accident involving auto fuel.  When I saw him a few months back his chin was fused to his chest from the burns.  One of our surgeons has been slowly debriding his wounds and grafting skin onto the wound in multiple stages.  His chin is now off his chest and he has fairly good range of motion, but he has a ways to go.  I had taught him the "exploding fist punch" on my first visit and was glad to see he still remembered it.  He's such a sweet child, smiling and throwing out whatever English phrases he has learned in his 5 months as a patient at Camp Hero.  His face beamed when we gave him a soccer ball and a matchbox car set.  As I look at his photo now I am reluctant to include it here as it occurs to me that it may be shocking to some.  But it's not gratuitous.  It's a piece of the 'real life' Afghanistan we encounter out here.  Please know that the large wound you see does not seem to cause him pain: he pulled the dressing off himself to show us, and the tissue we see appears healthy - it will heal on its own.

We ate lunch at a dining facility for the local Afghanis.  It was an honor to be invited, and it was clearly the best meal I have had since arriving here in early March:  rice with lamb, chick peas, fresh tomatoes, onions and mint leaves.  There was also freshly baked na'an bread.  We used our hands to eat - right hand only!  It was sublime.