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The Woman on the Rope
We were on our way to the remote area of Koya, south of the mountains, a four-hour ride on donkeys to reach a community hit by a measles outbreak. On the way, we found a woman who had just given birth, completely alone. We stopped, cut the cord, helped deliver the placenta, and, thank God, both mother and baby were well. Then we continued our journey. When we reached the village, we met the community leaders. They told us that one in ten children died before reaching their fifth birthday. We also discovered a man practicing traditional “medicine”: he was cutting the uvula of sick children and charging ten thousand…
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The Wonder Doctor
It was morning handover in the doctors’ room, a space that during weekends doubled as overflow from the men’s ward. An empty, but still unmade, bed had just been pushed out.We were three Dutch doctors working here in Serowe, Botswana: Eric, Willem, and me. All three of us were young, at the start of our careers, with our families in tow. Eric had been on call over the weekend, and after finishing his formal handover he added:“That bed was for János Kovács. Maybe you’ve seen him in the private clinic? He owned the Hard Liquor Store.” Neither Willem nor I had treated him, though we both knew the name.János was…
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When Smoking Saved a Life
My first posting with Médecins Sans Frontières was in northern Uganda, not long after Idi Amin had been driven from power. For those who don’t know him: Amin was a brutal dictator whose eight-year rule left the country scarred by violence, fear, and neglect. His shadow still loomed large, and the hospital where I was sent — in Moyo, on the Sudanese border — was little more than a crumbling shell. We worked with what we had: simple operations, endless deliveries, and rows of sick children. There was no electricity, and my predecessor had left before I arrived, so I learned my patients by reading the thin paper charts clipped…