If I may quote myself (Five Smooth Stones), I learned a long time ago that that is the attitude that matters.
"At the Amnesty International fundraising film festival, we screened two movies that stuck with me: one was about an African surgery clinic to help women who had lived through a civil war, and had experienced such brutal rapes - usually while trying to get to their agricultural fields each day - that they had developed fistulas. In the tropical heat, those fistulas frequently necrotized. What we were trying to raise money for, was a bus to help those women get to the clinic, as they would otherwise have to walk there, sometimes over hundreds of miles; run out of their villages, shunned by their husbands (if he was still alive), reeking and rotting and sleeping in the dust by the side of the road. No other bus would take them, as they smelled so bad. The surgeon was a man from the country - he had fled as a refugee himself, gone to med school, raised funds and returned to open his surgery after the war.
He insisted that each woman who came would meet him first when they arrived. It had to be him, he knew this, he said anything he did to fix them with his knife would be nothing, if he could not first sit with them, knee to knee, and speak to them about what he would do for them, ask them about their children. Speak to them, look them in the eye - and not vomit from the smell. Once they were fixed up, sometimes they could return home to their families; if not they would be taught a trade."
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branchandroot
Re: The Halfway Point?
Date: 2022-04-13 11:38 pm (UTC)If I may quote myself (Five Smooth Stones), I learned a long time ago that that is the attitude that matters.
"At the Amnesty International fundraising film festival, we screened two movies that stuck with me: one was about an African surgery clinic to help women who had lived through a civil war, and had experienced such brutal rapes - usually while trying to get to their agricultural fields each day - that they had developed fistulas. In the tropical heat, those fistulas frequently necrotized. What we were trying to raise money for, was a bus to help those women get to the clinic, as they would otherwise have to walk there, sometimes over hundreds of miles; run out of their villages, shunned by their husbands (if he was still alive), reeking and rotting and sleeping in the dust by the side of the road. No other bus would take them, as they smelled so bad. The surgeon was a man from the country - he had fled as a refugee himself, gone to med school, raised funds and returned to open his surgery after the war.
He insisted that each woman who came would meet him first when they arrived. It had to be him, he knew this, he said anything he did to fix them with his knife would be nothing, if he could not first sit with them, knee to knee, and speak to them about what he would do for them, ask them about their children. Speak to them, look them in the eye - and not vomit from the smell. Once they were fixed up, sometimes they could return home to their families; if not they would be taught a trade."