pat had left this book for me when he came to visit. it's written by dr.orbinski, a toronto doctor who was at one point the international president of Médecins Sans Frontières. he writes about his experiences in various war-torn countries around the world - in particular rwanda. although it reads like a history textbook in some parts, there were about a dozen pages or so that i dog-eared and i just wanted to share a few of these with you here. if you get a chance, it's worth a read.
life isn't fair. (page 57)
" one day i was in a small village near Mugonero to help with a polio vaccination campaign. the clinic was in the middle of the village, and because our jeep had broken down on the way we were an hour late. babies were crying. the air was humid and heavy with the heat. still, mothers had come from all the neighbouring villages and lined up in the hundreds with their infants to get the vaccine. we'd been working for about an hour when one mother gently pushed her baby boy into my chest. he was beautiful, and so was she. she held his leg out to me. it was limp. i took the boy, and he smiled at me. he was a fat and happy baby who smelled of soap. his mother started to speak, and the nurse translated, telling me that his mother wanted me to fix his leg. she said he couldn't crawl like the other children and had been dragging the leg behind him for the last few weeks. i looked at the boy's health card as he played with my stethoscope. he had already had two doses of the vaccine. this was to be his final booster. twice his mother had bathed him in the morning and walked miles to stand all day to get him the vaccine, and twice the vaccine had failed. the problem had to be the cold chain - the vaccine had to be kept cold right up until it was used, otherwise it deteriorated. the boy started to cry, wanting to go back to his mother. "she has three daughters. he's her only son," the nurse said. i explained as gently as i could that the leg was never going to work properly. the mother stepped back from me as i spoke, holding her now happy baby to her chest. rwandans rarely cry in public. for a brief moment, tears came down her cheeks. i reached out to touch her arm. i noticed the calluses on her hands as her son wriggled to turn to face me. i felt my own soft white palms with my fingers. through the translating nurse i suggested that when the boy was older the mother could bring him to the Mugonero Hospital to see about a brace. she listened carefully, saying, "nnn, ehhh," and finally "yego" as the nurse spoke.
the nurse told me that the mother had cried because she knew her some would be a bicycle-chair boy. "but he can go to school too," i said. "no," said the nurse, "they don't have the money for both." by now the mother's few tears had dried, leaving faint white salt marks on her black face. she bowed her head to me, turned and walked away to some waiting friends. i left the line to buy a fanta, and it started to rain. the drink had been kept cold in the cooler at the roadside stand. i sat down on a big rock. the children laughed at the muzungu sitting in the rain while michael jackson's "thriller" played on a battery-powered ghetto blaster. the clinica can't keep the fucking vaccine cold, i thought, and i hoped that the rain would mask my tears. "
only humans. (page 253)
" she said that she had escaped being killed by the Interahamwe. "my mother hid me in the latrine. i saw through the hole. i watched them hit her with machetes. the men were angry and strong. i watched my mother's arm fall into my father's blood on the floor and i cried without noise in the toilet." i listened to her and watched her lips quiver as her words came at a slow, staccato tempo. i watched her brown eyes look away as tears dropped to her cheeks and i could not stop my own.
at that moment, i felt both despair and rage. despair that she knew intimately our capacity for the most extreme rational cruelty; that she was alone. animals could never do this. animals can be brutal, but only humans can be rationally cruel. we can choose anything, we can be anything, we can get used to anything, i thought. only humans can be evil. only humans can make this choice. i felt my heart pounding and i wanted a gun. i wanted to kill the men who had done this to her. i wanted to pull the trigger again and again and again. my heart was racing; i was fighting my tears, gasping for air, for freshness, for something other than this. then eli clasped my arm with his strong hands. i felt an overpowering despair for the little girl, for myself, for all of us - that we can be alone, trapped in our passions, in our reasons, in our minds, in our politics, that i and those men could be so angry and strong. "
because we can. (page 349)
" at one point during one of our meetings the minister had expressed his fascination with 'you MSF fellows and ladies. why do you do it?' he asked.
i replied immediately, 'because we can.' "
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