Thursday, March 08, 2007
Selling organs to survive - BBC News
Two years ago when the tsunami destroyed communities around the Indian Ocean, Lata's fisherman husband lost his fishing boat and nets.
Desperate for money she sold her kidney a few weeks ago. A hospital in Madras (Chennai) cut it out.
She has an eight-inch-long scar, jagged and crossed with stitch marks. It stretches round her left side just above her hip. She is still in pain, unable to sit or stand for long.
"The doctor told me I will have breathing problems and back pain. If I lift heavy objects I will be breathless," Lata says, "but I agreed to it because I have debts and I have kids. Who will feed my children?"
So it is, more than two years after the tsunami that some survivors, still without permanent homes or jobs, have been resorting to selling their own organs to make ends meet.
...
But more than 1,000 fishermen and their families, whose homes were destroyed by the tsunami, are still living in row upon row of identical white brick huts in Tsunami Nagar - a camp squeezed between a railway line and a power station in northern Madras.
It is a dirty, depressing place to be. Down muddy lanes naked children, pot-bellied, play in the mud. Televisions and radios blare out. Everyone lives cheek by jowl, right on top of each other.
The camp was meant to be temporary. It is six miles (10kms) from the port - too far for many fishermen to travel there and back every day to look for work. ...
Two years ago when the tsunami destroyed communities around the Indian Ocean, Lata's fisherman husband lost his fishing boat and nets.
Desperate for money she sold her kidney a few weeks ago. A hospital in Madras (Chennai) cut it out.
She has an eight-inch-long scar, jagged and crossed with stitch marks. It stretches round her left side just above her hip. She is still in pain, unable to sit or stand for long.
"The doctor told me I will have breathing problems and back pain. If I lift heavy objects I will be breathless," Lata says, "but I agreed to it because I have debts and I have kids. Who will feed my children?"
So it is, more than two years after the tsunami that some survivors, still without permanent homes or jobs, have been resorting to selling their own organs to make ends meet.
...
But more than 1,000 fishermen and their families, whose homes were destroyed by the tsunami, are still living in row upon row of identical white brick huts in Tsunami Nagar - a camp squeezed between a railway line and a power station in northern Madras.
It is a dirty, depressing place to be. Down muddy lanes naked children, pot-bellied, play in the mud. Televisions and radios blare out. Everyone lives cheek by jowl, right on top of each other.
The camp was meant to be temporary. It is six miles (10kms) from the port - too far for many fishermen to travel there and back every day to look for work. ...
Labels: suffering
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