Surgery for Children with Disabilities in Nepal

Drs. Ashok and Bibek Banskota, his son, and their hardworking team at the Hospital and Rehabilitation Center for Disabled Children never cease to impress us, but this year their expertise and resolve were tested as never before.

They mobilized the day after the earthquake, setting up emergency health camps in nine districts and opening the hospital doors to anyone, children and adults, who needed help — 24/7, for free. In the camps, they performed life-saving surgeries in tents, or outside, and provided everything from trauma care and mental health counselling to food, blankets, clothing, and 30,000 dignity kits filled with hygiene essentials to people who had lost everything. The camps, 98 in all, ended up offering relief and medical services to nearly 45,000 people.

Totally inspiring, but not surprising. Dr. Banskota’s utter dedication to healing is what led AHF to take a bet on him back in 1988. From our first meeting, our partnership grew. We followed him to a temporary children’s hospital he set up in a converted house, where the prosthetics were skillfully fashioned in the garage from PVC pipes. A few years later, in his quest to help more of Nepal’s most disadvantaged children, we helped him build “a real hospital”, the present HRDC. Since then, we have helped nurture it as it grew into the best pediatric orthopedic hospital in Nepal — with a network that reaches the poorest disabled children all over the country and trains more good doctors to carry on the work.

Over 66,000 mended children later, this partnership was a good bet. And now, as we finish repairs to cracked walls and broken pipes, and the young patients are being treated inside the hospital again, HRDC is back to doing what they are so impeccably good at — saving disabled children from a lifetime of suffering. And they do it all with compassion, patience, and a skilled hand.

Links:

• Learn more about HRDC
• Join AHF's mailing list!

Two weeks after the 7.8 earthquake, a couple of AHF volunteers and I drove through Sindhupalchowk to visit a field clinic being conducted by our partner HRDC in the village of Jyamire. It was not my first visit, and I had seen news of the devastation, but it was still incredibly shocking to see firsthand.

On reaching Jyamire we joined the HRDC team. They had set up under a tarpaulin on top of a hill. The camp was to be held in the village school, but it too was razed. Even the hill was cracked, another disaster waiting to happen come the monsoon rains! Villagers lined up calmly, were quickly registered and seen by one of three doctors—including Dr. Bibek Banskota, head of medicine at HRDC and the son of legendary HRDC founder, Dr. Ashok Banskota.

This was the fourth camp Bibek had conducted, out of 20 planned by HRDC. He told me he expected about 60% of the 300 or so patients he would see that day to have injuries resulting directly from the trauma of the quake. At the first camp it was 90%. One woman required an injection of local anesthetic into her injured knee; others had bruises and aching muscles.  Most of the rest had taken ill from the living and working conditions caused by the quake—one patient had developed breathing difficulties as a result of the dust from digging through rubble to recover bodies.

Another woman had fallen and injured her arm while running from her house, but it wasn’t critical enough to be of notice to the first responders. After withstanding two weeks of pain, Dr. Bibek put her arm in a sling and gave her anti-inflammatories and some pain killers. And as she was leaving she was handed a pretty, new dress.

And then there were children, not really in need of medical attention, but who welcomed any attention at all. Two nurses took their details and initiated psychosocial counseling with kind, thoughtful words.

Links:

• Nepal Earthquake Information
• Hospital and Rehabilitation Center for Disabled Children (HRDC)