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Roberto, How are you?
They do the same job as me but they’re also war victims. They belong to EMERGENCY more than I do, perhaps. After all, I’m a foreigner and I’ll be back in Europe in just a few months. I may be leaving, but others here never will. My mission will come to an end, but what…
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Living ‘small small’: what I learnt on my first mission in Sierra Leone
My first mission with EMERGENCY was to Sierra Leone. It was a dream I’d held for a long time. I worked practically everywhere at Goderich, in intensive care, Accident & Emergency, the paediatric and surgical wards, but the patients I came across most were children who had drunk lye. Many, many children come into contact…
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They were asking me if this was really Italy
Before Open Arms docked at the port in Messina yesterday evening, 15 January, our doctor Giorgio had been working on the ship with its crew and keeping us up to date every day on the state of the migrants on board. We had rescued more than 100 people from the Mediterranean in two boatloads and…
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‘Some of the hugs they give me literally make me quiver’
Where does all that energy come from? I call it a ‘rainbow of cultures’ – different personalities from different places, all come together here to make sure the local people have a future. This Centre is a school as well as a hospital. We teach technical work, hone professional skills and train Afghan staff. As…
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Another achievement for our Regional Programme in Africa
In October, Luca, Coordinator of our regional cardiac surgery programme, and Maria, a long-standing cardiologist at EMERGENCY, were in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, for the first heart-screening misson at the new clinic at Orotta Hospital, the only public referral centre in the whole country. Our Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery in Khartoum, in Sudan,…
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A glimpse of beauty amid the horror of this war
‘Mine injuries,’ I read on the chart on their beds. E. and N. are nine and 10 years old. War robbed them of their childhood in an instant. E. comes from a village in the Panjshir Valley. He was playing in a field near his house when he picked something up off the ground and…
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Let’s Look Forward
“The grass looked greener in the other field, so I thought I’d take my sheep there to graze. There’s an abandoned military base, but I didn’t think that … “ This is how Othman begins his story. A prosthesis replaces his left leg, which he lost in that field due to an unexploded landmine hidden…
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It’s only thanks to them that I haven’t lost my smile
I didn’t know the couple so well, but I went to the wedding party anyway to accompany my uncle. During dinner, the music was loud and we had to be close to talk. At around 11pm, I was accompanying a friend to get some food when, suddenly, we were overwhelmed by a very strong explosion.…
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Iraq: “I’ll Try To Tell You In Simple Words …”
My mother, father and younger brother are here with me. My uncles and my cousins, however, remained there. The war forced us to flee. It happened five years ago. I was 24 years old. Today, I live with them in the Barika Camp, Iraqi Kurdistan, together with other refugees like us. I began working with…
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Afghanistan: Twenty Years of Work
This old Uaz is beautiful. Today, she stands proudly in the garden of our hospital in Anabah, but how far she has travelled in Afghanistan. It is also thanks to this rugged vehicle that, 20 years ago, we managed to make our way through the Panjshir valley and open our first hospital in Afghanistan. In…