An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-first Century | 
| Author: James Orbinski
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Category: Book
Buy New: $29.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 177342
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 5.8 x 1.2
ISBN: 0385660693
EAN: 9780385660693
ASIN: 0385660693
Publication Date: April 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Hardcover edition. This item is new.
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
“As Albert Camus wrote, the doctor’s role is as a witness–to witness authentically the reality of humanity, and to speak out against the horrors of political inaction. . . . The only crime equaling inhumanity is the crime of indifference, silence, and forgetting.”
—James Orbinski
In 1988, James Orbinski, then a medical student in his twenties, embarked on a year-long research trip to Rwanda, a trip that would change who he would be as a doctor and as a man. Investigating the conditions of pediatric AIDS in Rwanda, James confronted widespread pain and suffering, much of it preventable, much of it occasioned by political and economic corruption. Fuelled by the injustice of what he had seen in Rwanda, Orbinski helped establish the Canadian chapter of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders/MSF). As a member of MSF he travelled to Peru during a cholera epidemic, to Somalia during the famine and civil war, and to Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
In April 1994, James answered a call from the MSF Amsterdam office. Rwandan government soldiers and armed militias of extremist Hutus had begun systematically to murder Tutsis. While other foreigners were evacuated from Rwanda, Orbinski agreed to serve as Chef de Mission for MSF in Kigali. As Rwanda descended into a hell of civil war and genocide, he and his team worked tirelessly, tending to thousands upon thousands of casualties. In fourteen weeks 800,000 men, women and children were exterminated. Half a million people were injured, and millions were displaced. The Rwandan genocide was Orbinski’s undoing. Confronted by indescribable cruelty, he struggled to regain his footing as a doctor, a humanitarian and a man. In the end he chose not to retreat from the world, but resumed his work with MSF, and was the organization’s president when it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999.
An Imperfect Offering is a deeply personal, deeply political book. With unstinting candor, Orbinski explores the nature of humanitarian action in the twenty-first century, and asserts the fundamental imperative of seeing as human those whose political systems have most brutally failed. He insists that in responding to the suffering of others, we must never lose sight of the dignity of those being helped or deny them the right to act as agents in their own lives. He takes readers on a journey to some of the darkest places of our history but finds there unimaginable acts of courage and empathy. Here he is doctor as witness, recording voices that must be heard around the world; calling on others to meet their responsibility.
“Ummera, ummera–sha” is a Rwandan saying that loosely translated means ‘Courage, courage, my friend–find your courage and let it live.’ It was said to me by a patient at our hospital in Kigali. She was slightly older than middle aged and had been attacked with machetes, her entire body rationally and systematically mutilated. Her face had been so carefully disfigured that a pattern was obvious in the slashes. I could do little more for her at that moment than stop the bleeding with a few sutures. We were completely overwhelmed. She knew and I knew that there were so many others. She said to me in the clearest voice I have ever heard, “Allez, allez. Ummera, ummera-sha”–‘Go, go. Courage, courage, my friend–find your courage and let it live.’
—From An Imperfect Offering
|
| Customer Reviews:
Other Peoples' Tomorrows May 15, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
|
|
|
