Villar - Winged Scalpel

Four stories, four different situations. Yet one thing they have in common. The homecoming.

Disasters and wars can happen so quickly. One minute is normality; the next there is chaos. To help you must respond the same way. If your heart wishes to go, then you go. If there is doubt, then you stay. But your colleagues, friends and family are those who are left behind. They say they understand but do not fully do so. They say they wish to help but do not know how.

For those who love you, disasters and conflicts can be difficult times. They follow every news bulletin; they remain glued to the spot. They do not sleep, they do not go out and they eat barely a morcel. Each time an aid worker is wounded or dies, it is you. Each time someone is kidnapped, it is you, too. They talk about you when you are away and make presumptions that are incorrect. They say you look sick when in fact you are well. They say you look well when in fact you are ailing.

However, it is those you leave behind the abandoned - who perhaps deserve most praise. With a wave of your hand you are away to some pestilent place on the planet. Yet the abandoned do not know if they will ever see you again, although they do know your life insurance is worthless. When the telephone rings it could be you talking cheerily of disaster. Or, perhaps it is a voice saying you are missing without trace.

Then there are those who are selfish, those who refuse to understand and those who prefer to disapprove. The elderly couple that criticised my unshaven appearance after Haiti. I sat near their restaurant table after three weeks without proper food. The patient who complained because Kashmir had disrupted her appointment. Or, the colleague who simply said I was an attention-seeker gone wrong.

When I return, I prefer not to talk immediately of my adventures. It takes me time, often weeks, to settle down. There are some experiences from which I will never recover and there are those that lead to the dreams, the anxiety and the recurring nightmare. When I return I also realise I am fortunate and that problems I once thought large are actually tiny. We live in a world where brother should help brother, sister should side with sister and where all mankind should pull as one.

Yet of what am I most proud? Perhaps it is the opportunity to make a difference, a difference when people need it most. How can I compare a clinic of fifteen patients in gentle England to 3,000 casualties screaming helplessly in some foreign field? I am older now. I have seen a lot, I have done a lot, yet there is still much more to do. My bag is packed, my arm sore from preparatory inoculations. The box of antimalarials is still in date. Meanwhile I continue working, my telephone is on and I wait. I wait for the call. The call that means I must leave loved ones once more, and that I should apologise to so many for what I am about to do. I tell them I will be back, as soon as I can, that I am doing what I believe to be right and they should not worry. I tell them there are people out there, desperate people, folk without a future who need our help. When my turn comes, as it surely will, I can only hope that I, too, have a future.

Different nightmares come and go but the terror, when it happens, is the same.

I wake up screaming, the sweat dripping from my drenched torso, my eyes wide open, arms flaying wildly in all directions. I turn, my trembling hand struggling for the bedside light. I fumble and I grope, frequently throwing the spindly lamp unintentionally to the floor. Then I find the tiny switch. For a brief second I wait, then I push. Instantly, from darkness, there is light. I sigh, I breathe deeply, throwing myself once more onto my back. I feel that distant sensation behind my eyes as the tears slowly well.

Rapidly the tiny drops become a torrent streaming down my cheeks. My body shakes, violent shakes, so forceful that the bed head thumps loudly against the wall. In the half smile, half grimace of distress, I raise my cupped hands to cover my face, as if to hide myself in shame. Always I say the same words, always my voice trembles, always I try to whisper and always I fail. Oh God! I shout in panic. Oh God, why me?

Then it is over, almost as quickly as it began. I relax, laying my arms limply down beside me. Yet the terror remains, the terror of a next time, the realisation that everything my dreams had shown was a horror I had actually seen.

The nightmare always follows the same pattern. I am walking down a rubble-strewn street in a destroyed city; somewhere primitive, somewhere poor, somewhere that tower blocks do not exist. It is early morning and the stench of death is everywhere. A shop sign dangles dangerously from a tilted post to my right, an elderly woman sits silently on an irregular boulder to my left. In the distance, at least as far as I can see through the thick, smog-like dusty haze in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake, I can see children running wildly in all directions, screaming for their parents, their friends, their brothers, their sisters. Yet whole families have disappeared, vanished without trace, and in a matter of a few seconds. The much-loved child has become an orphan in the same time as it takes to blink.

I stop to listen, but it is not the terrified children I hear. It is the voice, faint, remote, gasping, somewhere in the half-collapsed building behind me to my right. I turn and retrace my steps, just a few, but enough to hear the voice more clearly. Now I can make out individual words, they are more than just a mumble.

Help me, says the young female voice, Please help me.

Through the haze I see the pile of broken rubble extending outwards from the concertinaed floors of the small apartment block. The boulders are strewn across the pitted road like a reptilian tongue, the line of rubble forked at its far end as it was thrown from the collapsing building with explosive force.

I come closer. Now I can see the girl. Her stained, pink, floral dress is crumpled up above her waist. She is about 16 years old, now face down in the dirt, her head forced agonisingly to the left by the large concrete boulder that is lying across her lower back and right shoulder. I can see the tiny trickle of blood coming from the side of her mouth and, through the dust, I can also see her blue, cyanosed legs now devoid of blood and crushed beyond all hope of salvage.

I approach the girl, I squat down beside her, I grasp her small, cold hand in mine. I whisper gently in her ear, Im here to help you. My name is Richard. Who are you?

For a moment I see the girl give a gentle half-smile. Her eyes flick towards me, imploringly, begging me to help. Please, she says. Im stuck. Please get me out of here.

I look at the boulder that has pinned her to the ground, the boulder which has ensured she will never walk again. Probably, I suspect, the girl had almost escaped from the collapsing building during the earthquake. Another few feet and she would have been free. Yet she had perhaps stumbled and then the boulder had caught her, trapped her and crushed her to the ground.

I look harder at the boulder. One man, however strong, could not make it budge. It is massive, irregular, sharp-edged in parts, and has rusty and bent reinforcement wires protruding. Even if it could be moved, above us I see a large concrete slab held from its final descent by the boulder itself; one shift of the boulder and down the slab would come.