Doctor’s Without Borders, Ebola, and the Angels of Mercy
I recently attended a presentation by the President and some Field workers of Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Most people are probably aware that these medical personnel volunteer to practice their trade in the most unstable and dangerous areas of the globe. These kind of hot spots have become increasingly widespread in recent years. South Sudan has been the scene of senseless destruction for years, as has been Somalia, and today it is the Congo and Syria, and it just seems one could go on and on. Like most others, it is hard for me to even relate to these kind of environments. How do people live in situations like that? I guess they often don’t very long before their life gets snuffed out.
And yet there are doctors and other health personnel who travel to these places and try their best to save as many lives as possible under conditions which are appalling in terms of equipment, physical danger, health dangers, and extreme mental stress. “What”, I ask myself, “motivates them to undertake such a task in that kind of dangerous environment?” Many of these people get kidnapped, held hostage for years, get killed, go for long periods of time with hardly any sleep, and get burned out from stress so quickly that they often are rotated in and out every 6-8 weeks. Why would any sane person volunteer to do this? What motivates them to do this? And if they need to be relieved every 6-8 weeks from all the stress, how do the native people survive all this stress year after year? They get no relief.
Doctor’s without Borders is a main recipient of grants from my own little charitable fund called FANAFI (Find A Need And Fill It). The grants are not huge but substantial, and enough that the organization wants to keep me interested. Every year they call and indicate the President of the Organization or some other high up administrator would like to meet me when they are in Chicago on such and such a date. I never say yes and simply indicate it is not necessary for me to meet anyone from the organization, that it is a waste of their time, I have nothing to offer them in terms of any expertise etc. They simply have more important things to do than entertain me. But twice now they have invited me to sit in on a presentation by some of their field workers. Now that interests me for the reasons already mentioned. As a people watcher, getting to observe them up close is appealing to me. What kind of persons are they?
The former one was held in a downtown Chicago skyscraper in some sort of Legal Corporation Boardroom. There were less then ten of us there, very limited, which caught me off guard. This last one was in someone’s home and had maybe 60 people present. I no sooner got there, which is another story in itself, than it was cocktail hour and no one dislikes inane chit-shat more than myself. And it was crowded, and no one dislikes crowded babbling more than me. A double whammy. I stepped out into an empty room deciding whether to force myself to mix or just hide until the presentation started. But some young gal snuck up on me from behind and said “Hi”. It turns out she was not a guest but one of the speakers, a field worker who had just gotten back from Sierra Leon.
Lucky me, I now get a chance to probe her mind one on one. She grew up in Wisconsin, went to undergraduate school at Tulane down in Louisiana, and I forget where she did graduate work. I think her graduate degree is in Public Health, some sort of diagnostic degree. I am pretty sure she is not an MD. But that makes no difference in that she faced the same threats any health worker on the team would face. She had returned from Sierra Leon in late July after dealing with an Ebola outbreak, and was heading back in a few days. Most of the members of a medical team are nationals, not foreigners, and are trained by the foreigners. She had her own team and I think she was the only foreigner. At least in the slide show picture she was the only white person on the team. And the team was mostly young people.
The other two field workers giving presentations were older, middle aged. So what stood out in common about these health saviors? They certainly weren’t depressed or withdrawn or stupid. All were scheduled to go back and put themselves on the line again. While I have only seen a handful of the actual workers myself, they seem plain enough looking people, not at either extreme of the good-looking scale. They are clearly deeply moved by people in distress. Well, so am I, but I am not going to the Congo to get in the middle of it all. But they do. Why? They certainly don’t make a lot of money doing this. These ventures clearly give strong meaning to their lives, a sense of pride, a sense of accomplishment, a sense of importance—real importance, not the shallow Donald Trump kind of importance. What could make anyone feel more important than saving the lives of those with so little hope? These trapped and helpless people will die without the effort of these volunteers. I myself like to make a difference in other people’s lives but it has never been a question of life or death for myself.
Many people would question, “Why bother?, These wretched souls have nothing to look forward to, they are destined to perish one way or another.” Not a bad point but a scary one. The world is becoming filled with more and more people who are destined to perish from neglect of various sorts. Then again it is a perfect match— some of the least fortunate people get to live, and the workers get to feel contented and motivated by the help they give. I am reminded of what someone once said, “It is hard to dislike someone who likes you. There’s your peace plan.” And this is the core of an important truth. Until there is more widespread appreciation of diversity there can be no peace across the globe. I have taught in a high calibre University and in a State University located right smack in the middle of an urban ghetto. Both were challenging and interesting experiences. Yet teaching in the urban state university was more challenging and rewarding. At a quality university a Professor can speak gobbly gook and the students will learn, if not from the Professor, then from the book. Some of the brightest Professors are the worst lecturers, and usually least involved with students on an individual basis. And this is ok, these are the Professors who will make significant advances in their field. At a low level urban State University the students are not affected by advances in any field of study, but seek the help and motivation to improve their own lives. In truth, the system has been rigged against them from the start, and without the help of the more fortunate in life, most of them will never go very far.
Doctors Without Borders never takes political sides. They treat whoever is wounded or sick regardless of what side they might be on in any civil war. One volunteer told us that in the Congo the medical camp had people from one side of the conflict on one side of the camp, and persons from the other side of the conflict on the opposite side of the camp. Since many of these conflicts are religious in nature we have two religious groups, trapped into coexistence via being sick or wounded, and chomping at the bit to get back to the killing. Perhaps they have little choice, there is some personal safety if one can be on the side doing the killing and some safety being in the armed group that is losing for the moment. It is the hapless villagers who have no security. In Afghanistan the people were so beaten down that they simply cooperated with whomever were the guys with the guns in control of the area at any given time. American soldiers often complained that the villagers were helping the enemy too much. Really? Maybe these villagers didn’t live their lives inside some fortified “green zone.” Sometimes neutrality doesn’t save the volunteers and they are forced to flee after some of the volunteers get killed or kidnapped.
The volunteer I chatted with before the presentations told me that kids as young as 6 can be assigned a task of walking a day’s journey to catch up with a herd of cattle so an older child can be relieved to search for new grazing areas. Since water is scarce the child may simply have a little tin of water to sip on until they find the cattle. I found this incredulous and asked now can a 6 year old child not get lost? Or be harmed? She told me that the child knows enough to follow the footprints of the cattle. Hell, it is not uncommon in some American households for a child not to be very far out of sight of a parent until they graduate from high school and some offspring never do get out of sight of their parents until the parents die. What does all this mean for how a child’s mind develops? It seems either extreme is a disaster. Kids given poor environments as a child seem very likely to be hostile and non social as adults, and prone to violence against other people. Kids spoiled as children seem more likely to end up more withdrawn from others, have little appreciation for diversity, and adapt a family values mentality in which their only social circle are family members. When I taught it was always easy enough to spot the ‘spoiled brats’, the ones whose parents never let them have any independence or responsibility. They went through the motions of living but were rarely satisfied ‘campers’ and simply remained aloof from others most of their life.
Prior to these Civil Wars the youngsters led pretty happy lives even though they were working in the fields at such young ages. Poor but happy is an apt description. When we read books written by young refugees who trekked thousands of miles to reach refugee camps and later get sent abroad to live in more modern societies, they always seemed to have fond memories of life before the bombs came, their villages burned, and most family members raped and/or killed. Americans are aghast at how these people in these hot spot areas of the world treat each other, but seem rather immune to the life situation of the millions who live in our own ‘hot spot’ crime ridden urban, rural, and now suburban ghettoes. These kids are not out working in the fields at a young age but are trapped inside with bars on the windows and doors. When I was young the ghetto area streets and neighborhoods were always filled with people sitting on porches, kids riding bikes all over the place, ball games of some sort in the streets, and everybody knew everybody. Ride through these same streets today and not a soul will be seen except a few hustling to get back in their houses behind the bars on the windows and doors.
What does all this portend for the future with so many at home and abroad living lives of seemingly hopeless desperation? Thugs rule the roost in these situations, thugs with no kindness towards others as sort of pay back for no kindness received on their part from hardly anyone during their formative years. They emerge with a simple goal—to project an image in which no one better mess with them, and an attitude of ‘nobody has ever much liked me, and I now don’t much like anyone else. Doctors Without Borders cannot heal this kind of affliction. It is often in the eyes we can see the depth of someone’s pain. It is also in the eyes we can see the depth of someone’s happiness. Certain images tend to haunt me, and I wish she hadn’t told me about the 6 year old child all alone following footsteps of a couple of cows all day with a little tin of water for subsistence. Nothing can match the sorry image of a group of orphaned children trekking a thousand miles to reach a refugee camp. Nothing unnerves me more than looking into the eyes of an emaciated refugee on camera and see the vacant stare of approaching death. Some of these neglected children will survive and grow up, just as some of these neglected children in our own ghettoes will, and we are not often going to like the end product.
Humans are an advanced species, the only species with such advanced powers of comprehension. We suffer more than other species precisely because we understand the consequences of so many situations we find ourselves in. There are two pain pathways to our brains. One pathway simply tells us what kind of pain, where, and to what extent. The other pathway triggers our emotional response to the pain. The pain threshold for various pain activators (usually destruction of body tissues) is quite similar for most all of us. What differs a lot is our emotional response to the pain, that second pathway of pain to the brain. Some of us get hysterical with a certain level of pain and others are rather stoic. Morphine and heroin are unique drugs in that they block the emotional aspects of pain. That is why patients in pain like morphine, and it is also why many people whose lives are unbearable to them sometimes gravitate to heroin use. It is often hopeless to convince someone whose life is such that living is emotionally painful to them, that they should stop using heroin. Under heroin they just don’t care so much about their life situation. That is exactly why many soldiers on a battle front will use heroin to handle the stress of the situation and when they come back home they no longer need, and therefore, no longer use heroin. That is exactly why patients in pain are allowed to administer whatever the dose of morphine needed to relieve their pain, and when they heal, they no longer need or want to stay on morphine. It only took 50 years for politicians and the public to understand that morphine/heroin are not addictive drugs in the absence of physical or emotional pain. Because these two drugs are natural to the body and we all produce our own endogenous opiates under certain conditions, they are not toxic to the body at all unless someone takes heroing/morphine along with a lot of a depressant like alcohol, in which cases respiration can be suppressed enough to kill the person.
Humans are the only species with an advanced trait of ethics. Ethics is the only means, in a population with such diversity, where we can, via our ethical sense, level the playing fields in life so that more people can achieve some contentment in their lives. Because diversity is such an important component of God’s evolutionary process, there can never be level playing fields. The goal all of us have is to maximize contentment in our lives. Ethics only works if there is a reward for being ethical. Some people view the reward as a trip to Heaven. There is no real evidence to support this, but there is no way to disprove the existence of Heaven either. Ethics is two sided. It helps the less fortunate find some contentment in their lives and it enables the more fortunate in life to achieve some contentment in their lives. The truth is that most of the giving in our lives, at least for most of us, is to people that are not the least fortunate, and therefore not the most deserving of, or in need of, any gifts from us. At some point in my life I saw the inaneness of all this and, with few exceptions put a halt to this frivolous and useless habit. Ethics means finding time in our lives to directly help the less fortunate, or use our excess wealth to support charities which do help the less fortunate. Our ethical potential, like any other inherited trait, varies. It is harder for some people to be ethical than others. But if real contentment in life is to be achieved, we all need to try hard to be ethical, because if we don’t achieve our potential in this trait, we are not going to ever be really contented. We will end up being a mini version of Donald Trump, or Sarah Palin, or Rush Lambaugh, etc. We cannot be ethical and not have tolerance for diversity in so far as the diversity in question has no impact adversely on others.
My conclusion from observing these field workers is that they are really contented and vibrant individuals who have managed to maximize their ethical potential and are reaping contentment from their efforts. Naturally there are a lot of other ways to express ethical behavior without diving into the center of an Ebola epidemic. But it is hard not to admire those who do just that. I chatted with that young gal just a few days ago and now she is already back in the middle of chaos and risk, to her own well being and that of everyone around her. There are way too many dark clouds on the horizon for us to feel all is going to be well in the near future. So I resort to thinking in evolutionary time, not human time, and yes there is no reason to feel the process itself is in any trouble. Mother Nature bats last, and I sense she in now in the on-deck circle. Hold on to your hats, the near future could be a bumpy ride.
