Goodnight
The Chapel with Dr. Cassar
With the general nods and murmurs of agreement, Dr. Cassar inclined his head in acknowledgement, and started to tell his story.
“I left my home in Malta to study in England when I was 17, and then I spent six years at medical school in London. I worked very hard here, and after I graduated and spent a couple more years doing my foundation training, I decided to follow my heart and in 1989 I joined Medecins Sans Fronteires - which you might know as Doctors without Borders - to do charitable work around the world. I had always believed that everybody in the world deserves to be healthy and happy, and I wanted to help with that.”
He cleared his throat for a moment, sitting back in his chair and reaching for a small water bottle he’d tucked underneath it. After a quick drink, he smiled and looked around the room again.
“Did you know that Doctors without Borders have an
inflatable hospital? It’s a huge set of tents with inflatable structures in them, and it is always ready to be deployed anywhere in the world, all within twenty four hours of any disaster or crisis.”
The smile faded a bit.
“My first posting was not in this hospital, but I have seen it set up before - it even has a theatre for surgeries, it’s really very impressive. No, I actually went to work in Iraq, performing general medical duties, giving vaccines and helping with community health along with another group of volunteers. I was only a very junior doctor at the time, but performing eye care there was what made me want to become an eye doctor later. Eyes are very beautiful, especially under a slit lamp. Before I went out there, and while I was there, I was very nervous. I was worried that I would make mistakes, or that I would not be allowed to care for some people, because I was a man and Iraq was an increasingly conservative Muslim country at the time. I didn’t want to make people uncomfortable, but it’s also very important that pregnant women get medical care, and if my boss made me responsible for that sort of thing, I didn’t want to disappoint him.”
He took a deep breath in.
“I arrived in february. Five months into my duty there, I had gotten past most of these problems, and I was beginning to feel more at home. On the first day of August, we were having an clinic for expecting mothers, teaching them the benefits of breastfeeding, explaining what things to look out for if their babies became unwell, and telling them how they could expect labour to go - it was an evening class, so everybody was tired, a lot of the women there had been working hard during the day either at home, or at a job, but my colleague Joseph and I had worked a night shift just before and were expecting another one, so we had both woken up late and were feeling awake and alert. I…”
He paused for a moment, closing his mouth after a second when the words didn’t come.
“A small group of young men came in to the classroom, carrying AK-47s. They were furious with us, and believed that we were teaching their sisters and wives some sort of propaganda. Joseph saw them first, but I was closest to the door at the time, and I also had the best Arabic, so I turned and tried to tell them that they could not bring weapons into the hospital, and that they could not be here without permission. I knew that some of our students had very bad home lives, as well, so I was very scared that they might be hurt.”
He swallowed, keeping his composure with all the grace of a man who’d spoken about this before - probably in therapy.
“The leader of the group pointed his rifle at my head, and he told me that his country did not need our help, and that we were not welcome there. I told him that we weren’t doing anything wrong, and that medical care was very important for a baby, and then one of his friends shot me twice in the stomach, and I fell over.”
“I remember that there was a lot of noise, and that I kept praying that I wouldn’t die. ‘Please God, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, don’t let me die,’ I kept saying to myself in my head. We were only volunteers, there was no official MSF mission in Iraq at the time, so we had very limited resources, and I wasn’t sure if I would survive at all. Everybody was shouting and screaming, and I remember that the men who shot me kept looking down at me and yelling at my colleagues. Eventually, I fell unconscious, and I thought I had been killed. When I woke up it was in an Iraqi hospital, and on the news I saw that Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. The first Gulf War had begun.”
He ran a hand through his hair, and relaxed at last, giving a heavy sigh as he looked at the assembled party.
“We left the country after that, and I spent more time in a hospital in London - the same one I had studied at, actually. I saw a therapist about what had happened to me, I eventually recovered from my injury, and I went into specialist training as an ophthalmology registrar after that.” He gave everyone a little smile. “Happily ever after.”
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