Meet Gino Strada, unsung hero to the poorest victims of war
The surgeon has carried out 30,000 operations in conflict zones such as Sudan, Cambodia and Afghanistan, mostly on desperate people caught in the crossfire of war. No wonder he has some forthright views on war, healthcare – and why President Obama oversees a killing machine
Gino Strada of Emergency, photographed in London by Giles Duley for the Observer.
Carole Cadwalladr
The Observer, Saturday 13 July 2013
Three years ago, the photographer Giles Duley walked into the Salam centre hospital in Sudan and was taken aback by what he saw. It was unlike any hospital he'd seen anywhere, let alone a country as desperate and chaotic as Sudan.
It performed world-class open-heart surgery free of charge, it was calm, ordered and spotlessly clean. "I mean absolutely spotless," says Duley. "I've never seen anything like it." At its centre was a beautiful garden. And there, in a corridor, he found the only unruly aspect of the entire operation: the man who created it all, a bearded, straggle-haired Italian called Gino Strada, leaning against a wall, chain-smoking.
In the studio in east London where Duley was photographing him for the Observer last week, Strada was still straggle-haired, still chain-smoking: "Though I can stay 10 hours at the table in the operating room and I don't even think about a cigarette," he says stepping outside to have a quick one between doing the interview and having his portrait taken. "I don't even think about it until it's over."
The operating room is where Strada lives. He's a surgeon, a heart-lung transplant surgeon by training, who should be living comfortably in some well-to-do Italian suburb, but who instead has devoted the past two-and-a-bit decades of his life to living uncomfortably in some of the worst places on earth.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/jul/14/gino-strada-emergency-giles-duley
http://www.emergencyuk.org/
= new reply since forum marked as read
