• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He was Southern, handsome in a Tom Cruise sort of way, appealing as much for the attitude and accent he swung around as for his looks. Dressed in blue surgical garb, he wore a medical kit bandolier style around his shoulder. He’d been in Baidoa for three months and apparently was used to reporters barging in on his operations.

“Look, I don’t snivel about what I can’t take care of,” he said, examining the man’s open wound. “I do what I can do and don’t worry about the rest. I don’t have any nightmares. The floors are filthy, we have no running water, there’s puss all over everything, everything is infected, everything. It’s one of those things you never really know what it’s like till you’re actually here yourself. I mean, intellectually you can figure it out, but it’s one of those things you need to be here to really experience. You know what I mean?”

I was beginning to.

Dawn Macray, a pleasant nurse with short blond hair, came into the room. “We had a bomb blast last night,” she told me. “Fifteen casualties. Three died immediately. Today we’ve had multiple gunshot wounds, a couple of knife wounds.”

“Are things getting better here, now that food supplies are being airlifted?” I asked.

“Better how?” she responded. “They’re still killing each other.”

Raymond moved into the next room to help a retired American doctor amputate another leg. The doctor appeared to be in her late sixties and wore a miner’s lamp on her forehead for extra light. The Somali man’s wife was trying to prevent the amputation.

“Look, I’d like to save his leg, but we can’t do that,” Raymond explained, as the Somali hospital administrator halfheartedly translated. “I’ll tell you what, we won’t cut off the leg, we’ll just clean it up, but if he dies, it’s her fault.”

After this grim possible prognosis was translated for her, the man’s wife stopped yelling, and shrugged. The amputation didn’t take long.

“Everything’s a challenge,” Raymond said, as he moved to another patient. “You don’t have enough supplies, you don’t have enough equipment, you don’t have enough time. You’ve got too many wounded, and a lot of them, you can’t do anything for. You’ve got an infected leg, the bone is dying. If we were in the States, we could do something about it. But we can’t do that here. You do the best you can with what you have.”

When I came back to Baidoa several months later, I asked at the hospital for Raymond, but they told me he had gone back home. No one would say why.

IN THE INTENSIVE care ward of the hospital in Maradi, Niger, a four-year-old boy named Aminu lies on a bed. He is just a few feet away from two-year-old Rashidu, but is barely visible beneath a heavy wool blanket. Aminu whimpers softly. His mother sits on the bed slowly waving a fan over him to keep the flies away. Her name is Zuera and she is remarkably beautiful—high cheekbones, night black skin, and two small scars, parallel lines on either side of her face. They are tribal markings that were cut into her flesh when she was just a few days old. In some other place, she could be a fashion model, but one of her legs is deformed, twisted from a childhood bout with polio. She walks on her own, but with a slight limp, a small imperfection. In Niger, however, it makes her undesirable because she’s less able to work. She is married to a grizzled old man, with whom she’s had three children.

“Her parents were probably relieved someone would marry her,” a nurse says in passing.

“Aminu came in with severe kwashiorkor,” Dr. Tectonidis tells me, lifting part of the gray blanket off the boy’s tiny body. He cries softly at the sudden exposure, but allows Dr. Tectonidis to examine his blistered flesh.

“Water in the tissues, water around the eyes. And his skin is peeling off, because of a zinc deficiency.”

“He’s getting better very fast,” Dr. Tectonidis says to Zuera, smiling. “I’m sure we’re going to save him, if he makes it through another day or two.”

“You mean he could still die,” I ask, surprised.

“Oh yeah,” he says, handing