Dr. Orbinsky

[Guest ploughboy]

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Hi all,

 

Spotted this article about James Orbinsky the other day. He's the former head of MSF and

is a Mac alumnus. Interesting reading.

 

National Post

 

pb

 

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[Guest logosmd]

Hey Ploughboy,

 

Tried to get your article with little success. First off, what is MSF? Second, was the article published on January 12, 2003? (so I can look for it in the library stacks)

 

Cheers,

logosmd

[Guest tirisa]

Hey logosmd,

 

MSF = Medecins Sans Frontiers, aka, Doctors Without Borders. It was a great article too, but unfortunately I can't find the link on the Post's 14 day search. It shouldn't be too hard to find in the stacks though, particularly is you can use a database to help (can't remember the name of the database that helps you find newspaper/magazine articles, though... a lotta help I am, eh?). Good luck.

 

Cheers,

Tirisa

[Guest ploughboy]

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Hi Word,

 

Tirisa already answered your first question - sorry for not expanding

the acronym on first use.

 

Here's the article. It's rather long but it will save you a trip

to the stacks.

 

Regards,

 

pb

 

- - - -

 

Dr. Orbinsky's long road home

 

Former head of Medecins Sans Frontieres a witness to human tragedy

 

Sarah Scott National Post Saturday, January 04, 2003

 

 

Dr. James Orbinsky has found himself in some of the most

terrible human catastrophes on Earth. In the early 1990s, he

saw famine in Somalia. In 1994, he witnessed the madness of

Rwanda's genocide. He saw the World Trade Center towers

collapse moments after landing in New York on Sept. 11,

2001.

 

This is a brave man accustomed to being in the wrong

place at the wrong time. But how do you return to a place

that is normal once you have experienced hell? How do you

live what most Canadians think of as a normal life when

you've seen what he has?

 

I asked Orbinsky that question during a couple of

interviews in the lovely library of Massey College in

Toronto, where he is living quietly with his wife while

writing a book about his experiences. At 42, Orbinsky is

slim and sandy-haired. Today, he is casually dressed in a

turtleneck and jeans. He has just finished a three-year

stint as the world leader of Medecins Sans

Frontieres (MSF), also known as Doctors Without

Borders, which sends desperately needed doctors to troubled

places. When the organization won the Nobel Peace Prize in

1999, Orbinsky delivered a forceful speech about building

spaces of normalcy in the midst of profoundly abnormal

situations.

 

These days, Orbinsky is working with MSF on a campaign to

provide affordable drugs for neglected diseases, such as

malaria, that kill millions of people in the Third World.

But when I ask him what it was like to work in the middle of

a human catastrophe, his blue eyes stare into space for a

while before he attempts an answer. Then he speaks slowly,

haltingly, as he recounts the things he saw. He is not

hiding from the memories: On the contrary, he has learned to

live with the indelible mental images of terror and

evil.

 

- - - -

 

Orbinsky grew up in Montreal and studied medicine at

McMaster University in Hamilton. He won a fellowship to

study pediatric AIDS in Africa, which appealed to his

combined interest in medicine and international relations.

The experience altered the direction of his life. When he

returned to Canada, Orbinsky and some fellow medical

students set up the Canadian chapter of Medecins Sans

Frontieres, and after establishing a family practice

in Orangeville, Ont., Orbinsky answered the call from MSF to

help in such places as Somalia, Afghanistan, Rwanda and

Zaire. He was single; he had no children. He knew they

needed him. So he went: "When there is the possibility to do

something you know must be done, you fail yourself if you

don't do it," he says. "If you see something that demands

action, you have to respond in whatever way you can."

 

In 1992, Orbinsky flew to Somalia to be MSF's medical co-

ordinator in the famine that was ravaging the country that

year. When the plane landed, he jumped out, dodging bullets,

and piled into a Jeep that drove past skeletal corpses and

heavily armed men. The Jeep took Orbinsky to a feeding

centre, where thousands of starving people were waiting for

something to eat. No one was talking, not even the children.

"There was a blanket of quiet," he says. "People were so

weak, so hungry they were unable to muster the strength to

talk. The kids were quiet, which was so unusual. They

weren't even crying."

 

One of the tents was designated as a morgue, and in the

pile of bodies, Orbinsky saw something move; clearly,

someone was still alive. One of the other workers just

shrugged: The man was nearly dead anyway. Why move him?

Orbinsky pulled the man out and moved him to another tent.

"I knew he would die, but I couldn't let the catastrophe

degenerate to that. That was my first day, my first two or

three hours. It was an incredible moment. What is human?

What am I called to do as a person? Can you walk away from

that?"

 

Orbinsky is twisting his gold wedding ring as he

remembers those days. "The goal is to humanize a situation

that is intolerable," he says.

 

He remembers going to one town, where he met a man who

had walked 120 kilometres with his son on his back for help.

By the time he got to the feeding centre, his son was

starving and suffering from pneumonia. When Orbinsky

returned to the centre the next day, the boy was dead, but

even so, the father thanked him. "He just said we were not

alone." Orbinsky pauses again. "That is what humanitarian

action is all about." He had carved out a little piece of

humanity in a dreadful situation.

 

By the time Orbinsky returned to his family practice in

Orangeville, he had lost 35 pounds. "It was very difficult

coming home," he says. "There's nothing like reality to

challenge your complacency of your world view."

 

Driving on the highways north of Toronto, he kept

thinking of the man who had walked so far to save his son.

Then one day, an obese patient asked Orbinsky for an

exclusion from the law requiring people to wear seatbelts in

cars. "I said, 'Get real. I am not going to give you a

medical exclusion. Lose weight and improve your health.'

 

"It was difficult to function in a normal meaningful

way," he says. One patient with a breast-feeding problem

finally told him, "Dr. Orbinsky, you aren't really paying

attention in the way you did before." So he decided to quit

the family practice in Orangeville to head off to

Afghanistan, where he organized a medical centre that served

120,000 people in a refugee camp.

 

- - - -

 

Orbinsky landed in Rwanda in May, 1994, about a month

after the killing began. By the time he got there, the Hutu

killing squads were in the midst of slaughtering hundreds of

thousands of minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Most of the

doctors and aid workers had fled Kigali.

 

Orbinsky's mission was to establish a hospital on the

Tutsi side of the city. The hospital had three doctors and

five nurses, and it was more than a hospital: It was also a

refuge for thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus seeking

shelter from the madness.

 

When I ask Orbinsky what it was like to be in a city in

the grip of collective insanity, he pauses for a long time,

twisting his wedding ring. "It's almost impossible to

describe," he says slowly. "The weight of the air, you could

feel it. The humidity, the thickness of the place, the

resistance to anything human. You could feel it in the air

that you were moving through. It's not the tropical element

of the place. It was something else. A thick resistance

you're in, that you're trying to create space in."

 

Orbinsky quickly saw how little a doctor could do when he

arrived at a checkpoint manned by the Hutu killing squads,

the Interahamwe, who organized the slaughter of nearly a

million Rwandans. "There was no recourse, nowhere to go. You

come to a checkpoint. They've got machetes. There are a

couple of officers. The leaves are green. You can smell the

banana alcohol. That's where you are. That's it. There's

nowhere else to go, no judge, no court where you can say

this is not right. You realize ... I don't know what you

realize ... that there's no recourse other than what you

do."

 

No doctor can stop a genocide, Orbinsky says. That is why

MSF, along with the International Red Cross, called on the

world powers to intervene, a demand that would be

ignored.

 

"I remember going to one place where there were several

hundred kids." The kids, all Tutsis, were holed up in a

building surrounded by a Hutu killing squad, and they knew

exactly what was going to happen to them. "The killing

squads revelled in the terror; they wanted people to

suffer."

 

Orbinsky went to the scene and spoke with the Hutu

commander. "I said to him, 'These are children.' He just

looked at me. I asked, 'Do you have children?' He said,

'Yes.' Where are they? 'Not here in Rwanda,' he

replied."

 

"These kids are sick," Orbinksy persisted. Maybe he could

take them to the hospital on the Tutsi side. "There was a

long pause. He looked at me and said, these are insects and

they will be crushed like insects."

 

When Orbinsky returned the next day, he saw a blue tarp

covering the children's butchered bodies. "That was Rwanda.

That's what genocide looks like.

 

"On the other hand, there are people like General

Romeo Dallaire, one of the few true heroes, not only

in Canada but internationally." Dallaire, the commander of

the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda, was in charge of a

shoestring operation and couldn't get the soldiers or the

firepower he needed to avert the disaster. His requests to

the United Nations for reinforcements to stop the genocide

were dismissed.

 

"He did everything he could to try to get not just the

world to respond but the people around him," Orbinsky says.

With a handful of men and "peashooters for weapons,"

Dallaire had to rely on "a veneer of UN power," and yet, he

says, "somehow Dallaire managed save literally

thousands of lives. I have seen a lot of difficult

circumstances -- famines, wars, epidemics and so on. But

I've never seen anybody like General Dallaire. I have

nothing but the highest admiration for him."

 

Although not to the same degree as Dallaire, Orbinsky,

too, suffered when he came home from Rwanda. "I had a very

difficult time, especially the first year and a half after

the genocide," Orbinsky says. "I had the formal symptoms of

post-traumatic stress disorder" -- the intrusive thoughts,

inability to concentrate, to think clearly, to sleep well.

He would be driving along a highway and see a blue car and

the colour would trigger a sudden flashback, evoking a

horrific memory of the blue tarp and what lay beneath it.

"It doesn't bode well for safe driving," he says.

 

Did you try to bury the memories, I asked.

 

"I think that's a huge error," he says. "I don't think

one should construct one's life as a movie, with scenes you

can include or exclude, based on how you feel. My experience

is my experience. It's not a burden to know fully, and fully

understand what I know, what I've experienced. That is not a

burden."

 

Still, he acknowledges our desire to forget. "It's very

much a dominant Western cultural phenomenon" to bury the

terrible memories, he continues. "Anything that's

unpleasant, anything that disturbs us, we turn into a

psychological phenomenon. We have to seek therapy. We have

to purge ourselves or unpleasant thoughts. We have to

package them, parcel them, seek closure on these

issues."

 

But for Orbinsky, knowing what he knows is "incredibly

liberating," he says. "It leaves me in a place where the

questions matter, of daily life, of political life."

 

That is why he is working with MSF on how to deliver

affordable drugs to millions of people dying of AIDS in

Africa, or malaria, or other neglected diseases.

 

He was on that mission when his plane landed in New York

at 8:40 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001. Traffic blocked access to

downtown New York, where his meeting was supposed to take

place. So he asked the taxi driver to take him to New

Jersey. "I basically watched the towers collapse." Orbinsky

went to a hospital to volunteer for help. It was teeming

with doctors and nurses, but there were no patients. Nearly

everyone still trapped in the towers died when they

fell.

 

Orbinsky returns to his favourite subject, the lack of

access to drugs and medical treatment for millions of people

around the world. Consider this: Less than 0.2% of the

billions of dollars the drug industry invests in research

goes to tropical diseases, even though they account for

one-fifth of the world's deaths. One day, perhaps, that will

be regarded as totally unacceptable, as slavery once was, he

says. It's a cause he's devoting himself to completely these

days. It is his way of responding to the horror.

 

 

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[Guest logosmd]

ploughboy,

 

Thanks for posting the article. Very powerful. Certainly makes you consciously reflect on your own motivations and commitment, doesn't it?

 

logosmd