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‘If Other People Have Done It Before, So Can You!
Finding your bearings, getting used to the routine in a hospital and working with new colleagues all require a spirit of adaptability and flexibility. I trusted in myself and EMERGENCY but I admit, it wasn’t easy at the start. But slowly, as the days pass, you start to find things out and your mindset changes.…
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Iraq: We Left Everything Under the Ruins
“We’re forced to live here, in this damp tent,” Edoo Murad tells us. He is sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, next to his wife. She stares at the ground, stroking her fuchsia skirt with her fingers. “When ISIS invaded, my family and I lost everything,’ he tells us, beating his coarsened palms…
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Land and Sea: Rights Denied Everywhere
The clock had just struck two when the head of our mission came to tell me there was a dinghy drifting a few miles from the ship. Just a few hours before we had been told a dinghy had capsized, leaving 60 people in the sea. Everyone on board was tense. You could read the…
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Reports from Lashkar-gah
Over 2,300. This is the number of patients received this year in our Surgical Centre for War Victims, LASHKAR-GAH, in Afghanistan. Thousands of the wounded have passed through our hospital’s doors, victims of the daily violence of a war that spares noone. Outside of our hospitals, which are connected to a network of First Aid…
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Our bodies are maps of pain
The rocky mountains around Sulaymaniyah are capped with snow. Rain beats on the door of every house and on the roof of EMERGENCY’s Rehabilitation Centre. Samad leaves his tailor’s workshop and comes over to us, taking care on his prostheses. He lost his legs, along with his left eye, when he was a child. “I…
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Twenty Years Have Passed Since That First FAP Opened
We wanted to provide constant support for war victims, even in areas that were practically unreachable, in the remotest villages worst hit by the conflict in Afghanistan. We wanted to meet their needs and be able to transfer them to our facilities after fighting had caused emergencies. It was this concept that spawned our network…
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A long journey…
A long journey… an important one that has a primary goal: supporting women. From the Panjshir Valley to Milan, passing through Brussels and finally back to where everything started: Afghanistan.. but this time Kabul. On Wednesday, we presented our Maternity Report, “A Quiet Revolution”, in the Afghan capital. Hosted by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs,…
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This is the desperation that Europe continues to ignore
“I thought I saw everything in Nigeria with Boko Haram. I thought I had endured the worst things in the world. But I was wrong. I hadn’t seen Libya yet. “ Traumatic shock, burns, gunshot wounds, hypothermia, and dehydration. This is what our nurse Gabriella and cultural mediator Ahmed tell us they have seen aboard…
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Afghanistan: “You are part of the history of this valley…”
“You are part of the history of this valley in Afghanistan, just as blood is part of the human body,” they told us. In Panjshir, Shahzia recalls the fear she felt before she gave birth to two twins and the happiness in knowing, once they were born, that she and her children were doing well. Often…
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“Here Are My Scars” – The Stories of Those Rescued by Open Arms
On the Open Arms vessel, our cultural mediator Bader, who helped staff with the search and rescue, listened to the terrible testimonies of the 44 people rescued from a small wooden boat on Sunday night. Among them is 16-year-old ‘A’: “I come from Mogadishu, Somalia. Before I arrived in Libya, I travelled through Ethiopia, Sudan…