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They were Prepared 09
MALAYA
THE G.I.S. had offered to provide personnel wherever needed. In 1945 the War Office said that relief workers were wanted urgently in Malaya—so urgently that the G.I.S. Com- mittee decided that Guiders from Australia and New Zealand, being much nearer the field of operation, would be preferable to Guiders from England. The Australian and New Zealand Guide headquarters were ready to co-operate, and it needed onlv their Governments' consent for the volunteers chosen from those in training to leave their homelands. A team of four New- Zealand relief workers arrived in Singapore by R.A.F. transport plane on December 30th, but the Australian team of four could not sail from Sydney until March 1946; they reached Singapore a month later.
The New Zealanders were sent, on arrival, to the Malayan headquarters of the British Red Cross Society in Kuala Lumpur by night train, sleeping on bare iron mattresses, a legacy from the Japanese occupation. When they reached their destination the dietitian of the team was attached to the British Military Administrative Nutrition Unit to advise on feeding scales for factory workers and prisoners and to organise supplementary meals for schoolchildren, the majority of whom were suffering from nutritional deficiencies, resulting in skin infections, beri- beri, mild scurvy, anaemia, hookworm and malaria. Food was hard to come by, but what was obtained was used to the best advantage.
The rest of the team were posted to Malacca, where they did general relief work in co-operation with Asiatic committees. Malayans and Chinese coolies (now returning from Siam, where they had been taken to work on the Burma-Siam railway) were in desperate need of clothing, food and money. It was the team's task to take supplies to outlying villages and distribute them among the most destitute people.
Faced with the same general conditions, the experiences of the Australian team were rather different. On arrival in Singapore they were, asked whether they would go up-country to Khota Bahru and take charge of an area north of the Kelantan River along the frontier of Siam, where cholera was prevalent and an epidemic of smallpox was spreading rapidly. They were warned that the journey would be dangerous and the work difficult, but they were assured that there was no team available more competent to deal with the situation—and this, in spite of the fact that they were not a special- ised medical team, and had only one trained nurse among their members.
They went, and within a week had organised six centres in the jungle to which people from the surrounding villages could come to be vaccinated. There was a dire shortage of vaccine, but the Chief Medical Officer and the hospital gave all they had, and the team managed to vaccinate up to a thousand people a day. In a few weeks' time the number of smallpox cases began to lessen, and the team could turn its attention to the other terrible diseases afflicting men, women and children.
The New Zealand team distributing Canadian Red Cross parcels in Malaya
The most prevalent were malaria, tropical ulcers, yaws, cholera, tuberculosis, scabies, infected wounds, sores of all kinds, and fevers. It was an unremitting strug- gle against enor- mous odds. Arsen- ic, needed for the cure of the most distressing of the diseases—yaws—was apparently unob- tainable—but the team could not see their meagre stocks dwindling without making a supreme effort to bring relief to the thousands of sick and dying around them. They cabled to G.I.S. (Australia) asking for ten thousand ampoules of Acety- larsen to be sent by air.
A member of the Australian team giving an injection at one of the jungle centres
Nobody except the team believed that the Australian Guides would send them, for they were not only expensive but difficult to obtain anywhere. The last of the meagre orig- inal stock of the drug was exhausted; other remedies were tried, but failed to cure. Then, just when the team could hardly bear to watch their patients growing worse, a cable came to say that the whole ten thousand doses were on their way by air. The consignment, worth £600 in Australia, would have brought thousands of pounds on the black market in Singapore, and it had to be watched every mo- ment of its journey up to Khota Bahru. The news of its arrival spread quickly and the patients poured in. The team gave in- jections daily and watched their patients recover.
When orders came from the British Red Cross that all civilian teams would be with- drawn, the volunteers were able to organise their villages so that the people could treat many of their own ailments, and before they left Khota Bahru in September, 1946, they handed over supplies from Australia—soap, medi- cines and disinfectants, as well as clothing—to the head man of each village for distribution.
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