MDA in Aza

Hi everybody, I started MDA (Magen David Adom) the ambulance service. It is great fun! The station in Holon is amazing and so are our apartments. I miss Jerusalem though. The training week was amazing I met a lot of old friends there and made a lot of new ones. But it is good to have a place for myself again. We are doing everything by ourselves now. We kook, clean and shop together. The place we live on the city limit and looks out over fields all the way up to Tel-Aviv we are not to far from the centre of town though and Tel-Aviv is close too so we have everything we need close by. Our first shabath together was fantastic except for the fact that I was terribly sick most of the time. We had a few guys over who are doing Marva (two months of army training) and we also had some guys over who are doing MDA in Netanya so the houses were packed.

Here is a small assay about one of the calls I had so far.

On the subject of ethics.

What I give you here is a report of something I witnessed here as a volunteer in the ambulance service of Israel, Magen David Adom. I do not give my opinion although you may ask it of me if you want and I will answer. I will try to give you all the important details and such. Here it goes.

Last Wednesday I was working my first shift during my gap year (I have worked shifts before) in my station in Holon (Cholon for the Dutch people) in the centre of Israel. At around 15:30 we got a call from for a patient who needed to be transferred from a hospital in Tel-Aviv to Aza (Gaza). We, the driver, a boy who was doing his national service and me, went from Holon to Tel-Aviv. This took us about 20 minutes. In Tel-Aviv we double checked the Ambulance for all the necessities. We found that we were short of one helmet. So we waited for someone to bring us one. (Another 20 minutes) Now we went in to the hospital to get our patient and her brother, both of them in there late fifties or early sixties. The woman wasn’t really talking but the brother was talking to my driver in broken Hebrew, he seemed to be a very polite and kind man. He was telling us about his stay in Tel-Aviv and how he was sorry to bother us with their entire luggage but they had been in Tel-Aviv for 30 days. Then there was some paperwork to be done and soon we were off. During the ride to the border there was not much talking. From the few words of Arabic I had picked up during my volunteering in Ashdod I understood that the woman was in a lot of pain and was praying. I tried to calm her down and she soon fell asleep and sitting in the front, so did I. I woke up and noticed that everybody was pretty tense. We were at Askelon and would soon reach the border.

I soon found out what was bothering everybody. “Just today there were 40 kasam rockets on S’derot and 30 on Ashkelon, it’s still light, there might be more to come.” My driver told me. Fortunately we reached the border without any rockets falling close to us. (I think a few more hit in S’derot just 10 kilometers south-west of us but I am not sure). At the checkpoint started the endless paperwork and then we had to drive up to the border. We parked the ambulance on one side of the 4 meter tall wall and waited. Soon a soldier came to check our clearance. Then a man came who took the luggage and the patient without saying a word. He disappeared beyond the wall and soon came back with our ambulance bed. The patient had been transferred to a Palestinian Ambulance about 25 minutes after we arrived at the checkpoint, fully 2 hours after we got the call.

We took one more, long look at Aza, it was so quite now, dead quite. We returned to the Ambulance and we were of back home.

This all raised a lot of questions to me, such as “Should a country give medical help to people who are not their own citizens?” “Should patients be transferred through such an unsafe zone?” “Is all the paperwork not dangerous for the patient?” “Were should we draw the line between personal care for the patient and national safety?” And many more, which I am sure you can also think of. Than there was of course my private question of where I would draw my line when in comes to taking risks for patients. I think I figured it all out for myself now.

Now I am curious to hear your thoughts on this.

See you soon,

Bram.

P.S. next time I'll tell you about how I flooded my apartment.