About 15 children’s backpacks lie torn apart in the rubble – pink, blue and orange bags with books spilling out of them. Spiderman toys and letters of the alphabet are scattered among broken chairs, tables and garden slides at the remains of this preschool destroyed by the huge earthquake that hit Myanmar on Friday. It is in the town of Kyaukse, about 40km (25 miles) south of Mandalay, one of the areas hit hardest by the 7.7 magnitude quake that killed at least 2,000 people.
Injured people were being treated in makeshift tents outside the capital’s biggest hospital in sweltering heat. Just 10 minutes’ drive away, we had visited the capital’s largest hospital – known here as the “1,000-bed hospital”. The roof of the emergency room had collapsed. At the entrance, a sign saying “Emergency Department” in English lay on the ground.
There were six military medical trucks and several tents outside, where patients evacuated from the hospital were being cared for. The tents were being sprayed with water to give those inside some relief from the intense heat. It looked like there were about 200 injured people there, some with bloodied heads, others with broken limbs.
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