A Boston woman, recently returned from South Vietnam, yesterday reported on her stay in Saigon. "I visited one civilian hospital," she said, "and I was shattered by what I saw."
The Woman, Mrs. Joseph Moore, spoke at a press reception held by the Committee on Responsibility--a one-year-old national organization which has brought wan-injured Vietnamese children to the United States for medical treatment.
For six weeks this winter, Mrs. More was the foster mother of two of the children, Nguyen Phat Luom and Trang Cuong Viet, who were treated for severe urns and shrapnel wounds at the Beth Israel Hospital in November. Mrs. Moore accompanied the two children back to their families and left Saigon on January 30, only 12 hours before the current Viet Cong offensive began.
COR, which since the beginning of October has brought ten Vietnamese children to this country for treatment, was hoping to bring six more--all from Da Nang--in February, but the fighting of the past week has disrupted these plans. "God knows what's left of anything out there," Mrs. Martin Peretz, national treasurer of COR, explained yesterday.
Complexities
Mrs. Peretz said that bureaucratic complexities within South Vietnam's Ministry of Health added to the difficult of COR's work. "They definitely are trying to slow it down," she said. "They consider the children adverse propaganda."
Dr. Frank R. Ervin, assistant professor of Psychiatry and a board member of COR, added that 21 different steps were necessary to clear a child for treatment in the United States.
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CRITICAL ISSUES IN NATIVE AMERICAN AFFAIRS