A Strange Triumvirate – London – Toronto – Kabul. A Kabul hospital comes out the winner

By Heidi Kingstone

Kabul, June 26, 2007

The road to the hospital is paved, quite unusual in Kabul, and the sign outside rather non-descript and without the usual idiomatic English that is as often amusing as it is confusing.

It isn’t my normal thing to haunt the halls of mental hospitals but something made me ask my driver to stop. There are gates that surround the grounds of the decaying hospital, but that is nothing unusual here. Gates surround houses that reveal hidden gardens, and green grass, only once you cross the threshold.

Dr Sayeed Abdul Ahad Qureshi had just returned from Friday prayers when we arrived, and he seemed rather disinterested in this foreigner who was simply a curious interloper. We stood in the driveway talking, I’m not sure what I said except that my father is a psychiatrist and I wondered what conditions would be like here in Kabul where there is a fight to survive and in a mental hospital, which usually finds itself on the bottom rung. I suppose I wondered how bad things be.

As we continued our conversation, Dr Qureshi, the deputy director of the hospital, offered to show us around. Actually, it was the last thing I wanted. I hate hospitals, I have little resistance to sadness, but I found myself looking at dark wards and a crowded room of miserable people lying or sitting on threadbare sheets, me, feeling uncomfortable and voyeuristic.

A few days later I returned and asked for a list of the drugs they needed to survive, and I emailed my Toronto connections. The first was my friend Sandy Fainer who had introduced me several years ago to Barry Sherman, the CEO of Apotex, a giant generic drug firm based in Canada, which started the ball rolling.

Barry said he would see what he could do. For a while I heard nothing more. Then I received an email asking for my address and informing me that 14 boxes of supplies, delivered free, would be donated to the hospital.

I had to bide my time and wait until the parcels arrived before I went to the Mental Health Hospital as I had not actually mentioned my plan. When we drove up in the 4×4 filled to the top, and I explained what this was, I could actually see the joy on Dr Qureshi’s face.

It was one of those intensely moving moments when you realize that having done something like this has made a small difference; itâ•°s one of the gratifying things about being in Afghanistan. Small initiatives can make an impact. In this case it is to people suffering from all kinds of mental illness and drug addicts, most of whom have returned addicted from Iran.

That day, in mid-May, Dr Qureshi told me there were no drugs in the hospital. Every few weeks the Ministry of Health is supposed to send supplies, but since mid-March nothing had come. When patients need drugs the staff go to the bazaar, but when they have supplies patients get beds, drugs, and treatment free. When Dr Qureshi first came back from Peshawar, Pakistan, where his family still lives, he thought there was much hope for the new Taliban-free country.

A few years later that hope has faded. The staff, including Dr Qureshi, get paid Af2500 a month, about $50.00. There is not much glory. When he arrived many of the patients were in chains. He got those removed and only one man now has his hands bound because there isn’t the personnel to deal with his violent outbursts. So we registered the drugs, following some ad hoc Soviet-style bureaucratic procedure, with each ensuring the other that the medicine will go to the patients and not into the blackmarket for a quick profit. (Inshallah) I wrote on the drugs list that I had requested the medicine specifically for this hospital so it couldn’t be confiscated and given to anyone else.

All of a sudden I looked around the doctor’s office and realized that out of half a dozen men who had gathered I was the only woman. Not only that. Every one who helped was Jewish- SANDY FAINER who made the intial contact, BARRY SHERMAN, APOTEX’S CEO, me, and FRANK BONELLI who is trying to set up a Child Psychiatry exchange Program.

White sheets covered the chairs, the desk, the sofa, and the doctor had taken off his slip-on plastic sandals that everyone here wears. There really was an element of excitement, and gratitude, in the sense that someone actually cared and tried to do something, and that there were some results. We drank green Afghan tea out of clear glass mugs, while someone brought in a stamp that put the official seal on our unofficial deal.

A strange triumvirate, London, Toronto, Kabul, a serendipitous decision to stop at a scruffy looking hospital that when I drove away the last time, there was herd of goats rummaging at the door.

Heidi Kingstone is a London-based journalist who recently returned from a 4 month work committment in Kabul.