Moving
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An Imperfect Offering is a deeply moving, captivatingly told story of one man's lifetime of humanitarian efforts that border on the super human. It is hard not to retain hope for our future even in the face of the horrors intimately described in this book when we have people around with the depth of care for the human condition shown by Dr. Orbinski.
Briefly covering his early upbringing including the seeds of his exceptional compassion Dr. Orbrinski moves to his assignments with Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Somalia, Afghanistan and Rwanda. His narrative is intensely personal and disturbing. The Rwandan genocide was particularly difficult and is the subject of a lengthy and graphic chapter. Later Dr. Obrinsky describes his term as president of MSF during which he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to MSF in 1999 and his pivotal roles in; founding Dignitas International to "harness the natural compassion of communities," launching the Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines to bring life saving drugs to millions living in poverty and creating the Drugs for Neglected Diseases, a company to develop drugs with insufficient profit potential to interest big Pharma. One wants to cheer with each of Dr. Obrinski's successes and can't help sharing his tears.
Throughout Dr. Obrinski delves into the global political milieu, it's affect on humanitarian actions and MSF's responses which often forge a new and timely direction for NGOs. It is a useful addition to the book but is done from a typically Canadian left wing position resulting in a rather one-sided perspective. For example, he dismisses all of Bush's (the second) actions following 9/11 with scant thought or understanding. It is perhaps, sadly ironic that he seems blissfully unaware that a similar lack of empathy in leaders and activists around the world is often a key element leading to the tragic situations he so bravely fights to overcome. But that is a small quibble. For it is not Dr. Orbrinki's mission to understand or prevent what he calls "rational cruelty" but to mitigate the results. In those matters, Dr. Obrinski has empathy to spare. His book is well worth a read.
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Other Peoples' Tomorrows
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Just finished Dr. James Orbinski's new book, An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action for the 21st Century. For those of you who don't know him, Orbinski is one of Canada's global health heroes. He accepted the Nobel Prize for Doctors Without Borders while he was its international president and has since worked on developing MSF's Access to Essential Medicine's Campaign and establishing Dignitas International, an organization that provides community-based HIV/AIDS treatment in Malawi.
I've heard Orbinski speak a couple of times, including at the Hope in the Balance forum last November. His talks provoke the idea of thoughts and a world view constantly evolving. This makes him especially human, despite his almost super-human committment to justice and health. One of his strongest messages is the world's need to create what he calls "humanitarian space," unobstructed by politics and military. Orbinski's experiences in Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and elsewhere have made clear the problems of military co-option of humanitarian action. The classic example is the dropping of both bombs and food packets within Afghanistan; in several cases children have confused the two and were harmed rather than fed.
Orbinski's book is part memoir, part call to action. He takes the reader through some of the most devastating humanitarian disasters of the past 20-odd years, from the Rwandan Genocide to New York on September 11, 2001, when Orbinski worked in triage at Ground Zero. It struck me that on several occasions Orbinski has had a relationship with the countries he visits beyond their experience of humanitarian emergency, allowing him to describe the harsh differences between the time of acute crisis and normal daily life. For example, he worked in Rwanda doing HIV/AIDS research several years before the start of the 1994 genocide. This element helps him to challenge the perspective of African nations (and other developing countries) as places of perpetual crisis, while at the same time demanding action when that crisis does take place.
Books about global health and its personalities are compelling reads. For some reason they are more successful at keeping me riveted than Tipping Point or The DaVinci Code ever were. Perhaps it is because despite the complexities of humanitarian action that Orbinski describes, the moral action of healing the sick seems so much less ambiguous than the general project of development. However, as he describes his own quest to ask the right questions he deems necessary to improve "other peoples' tomorrows," Orbinski recognizes the political side of humanitarian action, and the need to speak up about what he has witnessed.
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A ray of Hope
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It really is difficult to find words to describe the hope that this book gives. Although it describes deeply disturbing and difficult to comprehend suffering, it is written by a man who continually describes himself as 'a man' but describes situations in where his behaviour and devotion come straight from heaven. "A human perspective on suffering" just doesn't do this book justice. this book provides the decidely un-human (meaning more than human) perspective and unbelievable willingness to accept hope in the face of evidence that there should be none. It should be mandatory reading.
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