Cleveland Clinic volunteers travel to Bangladesh to help in refugee crisis
▶ Team of specialists tell of harrowing plight of Rohingya displaced
Caregivers from an Abu Dhabi hospital embarked on a vital mission of mercy in Bangladesh to bring hope to Rohingya refugees embroiled in the world’s fastest-growing humanitarian crisis.
Volunteer clinical staff from Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi spoke of the desperate plight of those living in camps in the impoverished country.
The refugees now face the threat of monsoons, having fled their homes in the northern Rakhine province of Myanmar to escape starvation, rape and mass murder.
About 900,000 Muslim Rohingya now shelter in shanty tents made of bamboo sticks and plastic in neighbouring Bangladesh after fleeing from what the UN has described as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.
But respite from the horrors of their homeland could be short lived, as monsoons are likely to bring more death and destruction.
The Abu Dhabi hospital, working with charities and official relief organisations, treated up to 200 patients a day, from babies to the elderly, for conditions ranging from respiratory issues to parasitic infections.
Elizabeth Gilmore, an emergency department nurse, spent a week in Bangladesh in April and said that while the situation looks bleak, she has not given up hope of a brighter future for the long-suffering refugees.
“If you walk into the camp it is thousands upon thousands and thousands of people on top of each other in bamboo structures with tarp on top trying to get some sort of shelter from the heat and the rain,” Ms Gilmore said.
Many refugees suffer from hypertension and diabetes, with more serious diseases such as cholera and malaria also prevalent.
“We saw things like mumps and measles, which people would normally be vaccinated for,” Ms Gilmore said.
Recently there have been efforts to vaccinate against cholera.
“We are hoping that will cut down on quite a bit of illness when monsoon season comes,” she said.
Ms Gilmore has been a volunteer in many places but this crisis is particularly disturbing because so many in need find themselves in a country facing its own problems.
“I was in Nepal in 2015 because of the earthquake, which was a natural disaster with all their own people and their own resources, but here they are coming into an already impoverished country that can hardly provide for its own people,” she said.
“These people have gone through something I hope no one ever goes through again.
“I was able to see some of these pictures of what the children have gone through and it is massacres of people and villages being burnt, people hanging on trees, and hundreds of people being drowned in the sea.”
The focus now is on drafting in volunteers and funding to tackle the impending monsoons.
“There is hope but it will take a really long time to figure out how to care for 900,000 refugees,” Ms Gilmore said.
Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi volunteers who went to Bangladesh included five emergency consultants, an emergency nurse and an infection prevention and control specialist.
“Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi is proud to have caregivers who are prepared to offer their time and expertise to people in need, especially in the Year of Zayed,” said Dr Jacques Kobersy, chair of the Emergency Medicine Institute, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi.
Dr Christian Halloran, chief of operations for the institute, who was also one of the volunteers, said: “The scale of the challenges, the number of refugees and the diversity of health problems we encountered were daunting, but the experience reminded me of why I decided to practise medicine.”