Korean Medical Association in Aceh

Dr. Norbert Vollertsen, who is volunteering his services to help the Acehnese as part of the Korean Medical Association contingent, writes to update us on his activities. He includes contact info if you want to assist or donate–and he has pictures! Hope they won’t crash my site, but here goes:

Contact info of Korean Medical Association relief team in Banda-Aceh/Jakarta whom Dr. V is with: +82 11 792 6908 (mobile roamed from Korea) (Maybe +62) (0)868-1212-7826 (satellite phone)

Ms. Yoon Sun Park, KMA liaison officer in Jakarta: +62 813 1670 3151
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Jan.10

First, a small clarification from Acehnese organizer on Jan. 10 issue:

I wrote–“Also today there was a report on AP about an armed assault on the residence of local police vice-chief near the UN headquarter here by the separatist group Free Aceh Movement at an early hour.”

Acehnese rebutted–“This was disinformation, and has since been corrected, as the gunshots people heard were from an Indonesian soldier or police officer, not FAM [Link to news story here]. I hope the Koreans aren’t expecting accurate information from the military, or the media, about Aceh. As you know, there’s a long history of lies.”

Today our team did divide ourselves into three smaller units. The first unit worked at the emergency room of Pakinah–sorry for the misspelling yesterday as Papina–Hospital in the Matai refugee camp. We mainly took care of internal and dermatological problems while IMA team did surgeries at the sameplace. This facility is also being shared by the Australian team. The second unit is also in the Matai refugee camp and began its work to prevent the spread of epidemic. The third unit has joined the UNICEF for its itinerary vaccination program.

Te[t]anus is spreading rapidly while vaccines and medicines are in short supply. The relief efforts are massive but the recovery of the destruction is far from controllable stage. Numerous bodies are believed to be still buried under the d[e]bris.

If I were to be asked to quantify the percentage of recovery, it would be perhaps one thousandth of one percent. However, now that the Base Camp is successfully established at this Matai refugee camp, there will be little problem for the second team to begin its reliefwork and the current team plans to leave Aceh on the12th returning back to Seoul on the 13th.

For an introduction to Dr. Vollertsen’s activities on behalf of the North Korean people, click here; he also recently published a book about North Korea, which you can buy here. Some have criticized his methods, and the South Korean government wishes he would just go away, but he consistently goes where the need is greatest and throws himself into the task of helping the suffering. That’s especially true of the issue of human rights for the North Korean people, which the media and some governments have simply ignored. More than any other single person, Dr. Vollertsen brought that issue a small fraction of the media attention it deserves.