UPE SSA 2014

DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS IN A THIRD WORLD CRISIS

By Elliott Leyton and Greg Locke

When the rapes and massacre, the plagues, the famines, the floods, or droughts erupt in far off places, the world stands still but MSF does not.

While others are stymied or delayed by bureaucratic red tape, the men and women of

Medicine sans Frontiers (MSF or Doctors Without Borders) move in. They provide food and clean water. They dig latrines. They set up first aid stations and field hospitals. They are often the last to remain in situations abandoned by others as too dangerous.

The risks they take are moral and ethical as well as mortal. They are acutely aware that giving aid is controversial. Does it really do any good to save a child from murder one day when it will probably starve in the weeks ahead? Is it appropriate to bring expensive western medicine into a country that, in the long run, can’t afford it? Should relief be given to civilians who are being starved on purpose, as part of a cynical political game, by a local warlord?

Elliott Leyton and Greg Locke saw something of the implications of these questions when they travelled to Rwanda in 1996. There they found themselves plunged into a humanitarian crises of epic proportions. Hundreds of thousands of people were on the move.

Armed militias and hostiles armies lurked in the background, mass starvation, plague, and an eruption into civil and criminal violence were immediate possibilities. The two Canadians, one an internationally recognized expert on the psychology of killing, the other, and experienced international photojournalist , had the rare opportunity to observe MSF in action.

They watched and listened, to the perpetrators of violence and their victims, to survivors and those who gave them assistance, and, above all, the people of MSF who dedicate themselves to save lives because, in the words of one MSFer, “The world can afford a humanitarian idea.”

The result of Leyton and Locke’s research is and extraordinary written and visual record of small miracles performed in the midst catastrophe.

(Match Point – Teacher’s Edition – Cleide Silva and Roberto Lobo. Longman, New York, 2003. Adapted.)