The gift of life

BAGRAM, Afghanistan - The plastic breathing tube helped keep 1 1/2-year-old Latifa alive after a rocket-propelled grenade exploded near her home during heavy fighting between Taliban insurgents and U.S. forces.

During the battle several weeks ago, shrapnel tore through her skull and damaged her trachea. Complications from surgery followed, but Latifa is expected to survive.

“Thanks be to God,” said her grandfather, Sharaf, an ethnic Pashtun from Kapisa province north of Kabul.

“She is blessed to be here. Everything here is more than what I can imagine doing for her at home - she is like a flower. I´m very poor, and we cannot afford to take her to Pakistan for help. The doctors and nurses here have treated us like family.”

Sharaf, who like many Afghans uses one name, spoke through an impromptu translator, Dr. Walayat Shah, an Afghan physician working alongside U.S. military personnel at the Craig Joint Theater Hospital at Bagram Air Base.

Just then, Sharaf turned toward Latifa with a smile, put her tiny soft hands in the rough fold of his.

“We call her Queen Latifa,” said Capt. Tiffanie Rampley, 36, a registered nurse from Spokane, Wash., who has been a primary care nurse for the little girl. “She´s beautiful.”

Latifa is one of the lucky ones, said Air Force Maj. Phylis Jones, the nurse in charge of the hospital’s intensive care ward.

“For each kid that we see that´s injured like this, there are maybe thousands more that don´t get the same care throughout the country,” she said.

“And it´s not just the children, but U.S. soldiers, Afghan security forces and other villagers from around the country that are treated here,” Maj. Jones said.

With Afghanistan among the world’s poorest countries, the ability of villagers to reach health care providers is many times impossible.

For soldiers on the front lines of the war, the Bagram hospital - which conducts nearly 200 surgeries a month and has about 38 beds - is a “godsend” as well, say medical personnel at the facility.

The new facility for U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force was completed in March 2007, and from the inside, it resembles almost any hospital in the United States.

Beyond the number of children, Tuesday night was no different from any other night. The beds were filled with the injured, both U.S. troops and Afghan soldiers.

Also in intensive care was a child who had burned nearly 40 percent of his body in an accident with a kerosene lamp.

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