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Wednesday, March 14th : Bombay to Bhuj, Gujarat Provence
I felt nervous when we arrived in Bombay, not knowing what to expect. Fortunately my travelling companion, Ken Lennox, is an experienced war photographer who has worked in Vietnam and the Gulf and is used to these sorts of situations. We've had our first set back already. We'd expected to find amputees in Ahmedabad waiting to be fitted with limbs, but it seems they've already been discharged and no one knows where they are, so we decided to fly to Bhuj ahead of time.
There was no one to meet us at the airport when we arrived, so I had to find out where to go. It was so funny. About a hundred Indian men stood around me, staring as I made calls on my mobile phone. I was wearing pedal pushers and one of them came up to me and started to touch my leg. Somehow he knew it was artificial which wouldn't please my leg maker Bob Watts.
Finally we took a taxi to a Red Cross hospital staffed by volunteer Finnish and Norwegian doctors, one of whom, Dr Vidar Lehmann Bergen, recognised me. I asked him to check in advance with the parents if I could speak to the children because I didn't want to barge in without asking. He thought that was odd, as none of the kids spoke English, but I knew it didn't matter. There are other ways of communicating.
The first person they showed me was a ten-year old boy, Dilip Pranji, who had lost his left arm through the shoulder. A piece of farm machinery had fallen on him during one of the after shocks in his village, 50 miles from the nearest hospital, and his family had carried him all the way. He was still in shock and looked at me numbly when I sat on the bed, but when I took his hand and got him to touch my artificial leg, his face changed.
When I took it off so we could compare our amputated limbs, he softened and got really interested. Even the doctors seemed impressed. They'd become used to well-known faces at the hospital, but none of them had come up with a party trick quite like mine.
Across the tent I spotted a little boy with his leg in traction, who was grinning at us, and I went over to him.
He was just ten years old, his name was Sultan Nurman and he had been trapped under a collapsed building. His leg had been pinned and screwed with an internal plate and the Doctors were hoping to save it.
The next tent was full of adult amputees. One old man, Nirmal Patel, had had his left leg amputated above the knee and he was in shock. I was told he had no fam ily left - they had all been killed in the earthquake. Many had died around him as he lay under the rubble. I felt at a loss. All I could do was hold his hand.
In the next bed there was a 30-year-old amputee, Mavji Hirgi, 
who looked more alert. He was too. When I took my leg off, he didn't want to give it back. He just held on to it. It was really funny. I was joking, "Are you going to keep my leg?" He just grinned. "Go on then, off you go", I said, "stick it on, I'll get into bed. I could do with a rest." He didn't speak English, but he knew what I meant. The tent filled with laughter and everyone started to lighten up.
In the afternoon we drove to another hospital in Bhuj run by an amazing woman called Dr Shantuben Patel. She trained as a doctor in Birmingham, returning to India after she qualified and dedicated her life to looking after babies and young children.
Her hospital hadn't been completely wrecked by the earthquake, but it is now very unstable and very dangerous, so she's put up tents next to it. In them were premature babies and also some malnourished babies because food was short after the earthquake. One was a two-year-old girl who was so traumatised after the earthquake that she kept picking up mud and eating it, which had made her ill. Others had bad ear or eye infections.
In another tent there was an incubator, which contained a tiny baby called the "earthquake baby" because she was born on January 26, the day of the earthquake. Her mother had been pulled from the rubble in a coma with brain damage and internal injuries and the baby had to be delivered by caesarean section. She was seven weeks. They'd told the mother's husband that both mother and baby would probably die, but they'd turned out to be fighters. The mother still hasn't seen the baby - she's in a Bombay hospital, but she's recovering slowly. They reckon the baby will make a full recovery.
As I picked her up she was sick all down me, which everyone thought was hilarious. Her dad has called her Reshma. She's seven weeks old now and she's just starting to smile. Every time I kissed her she smiled and when I sang to her she smiled - which is more that most people do! I could hardly bear to put her down.
I find it amazing that these children who have suffered so much can still be ha ppy. At the gates on the way out of Dr Patel's hospital I saw a woman with a very malnourished baby boy. He was six months old, but he looked about two months. His mother told me his name was Akder and asked me if I'd like to hold him. When I took him from her it was like holding a feather. His face was covered in flies, so I blew on him to keep the flies away and when I did that his face lit up. The more I blew the more he giggles.
This evening we met with the Red Cross doctor and nurses and had a few drinks with them. They told me many people had to have limbs amputated because they'd been so badly crushed and, with a shortage of antibiotics, gangrene had set in.
