Touched By Fire: Doctors Without Borders in a Third World Crisis - Hardcover

Leyton, Elliott

3.8

35 ratings by Goodreads

9780771053054: Touched By Fire: Doctors Without Borders in a Third World Crisis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771053053 ISBN 13: 9780771053054

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 1998

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When the rapes and massacres, the plagues, the famines, the floods, or the droughts erupt in far-off places, the world stands still. MSF does not.

They are the “smoke jumpers” among international aid organizations. While others are often stymied or delayed by bureaucratic red tape, the men and women of Doctors Without Borders (M�decins Sans Fronti�res or MSF) move in. They provide food and clean water. They dig latrines. They set up first-aid stations and field hospitals. They treat all-comers according to need. Often they are the last to remain in situations abandoned by others as too dangerous.

The risks they take are moral and ethical as well as mortal. They are acutely aware that giving aid is controversial. Does it really do any good to save a child from murder one day when it will probably starve in the weeks ahead? Is it appropriate to bring expensive western medicine into a country that, in the long run, can’t afford it? Should relief be given to civilians who are being starved on purpose, as part of a cynical political game, by a local warlord?

Elliot Leyton and Greg Locke saw something of the implications of these and other questions when they travelled to Rwanda in the fall of 1996. There they found themselves plunged into a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. Hundreds of thousands of people were on the move. Armed militias and hostile armies lurked in the background. Mass starvation, plague, and an eruption into civil or criminal violence were immediate possibilities. The two Canadians, one an internationally recognized expert on the psychology of killing, the other an experienced photo-journalist, had a rare opportunity to observe MSF in action at a time when the stress was enormous and its resources were stretched to the limit.

They watched and listened, to the perpetrators of violence and their victims, to the survivors and those who gave them assistance, and, above all, to the people of MSF who dedicate themselves to saving lives because, in the words of one MSFer: “The world can afford a humanitarian ideal.”

The result of Leyton and Locke’s research is an extraordinary written and visual record of small miracles performed in the midst of catastrophe.

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About the Author:

Elliott Leyton is a professor of anthropology at Memorial University in Newfoundland. He holds research and faculty appointments in Ireland and England, has delivered lectures throughout Europe, the United States, and Canada, and is a past president of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association. Because of his recognized expertise in the psychology of the multiple killer he has established close links with police forces around the world. His books include Dying Hard, The Myth of Delinquency, Hunting Humans, Men of Blood and Touched by Fire (with photographer Greg Locke).

From Booklist:

Leyton aims to make outsiders understand what is going on in Rwanda and many other countries and what makes workers for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)--which, as an independent organization, gets physicians more quickly into places where they are needed than, say, the UN--throw themselves selflessly into such horrible situations. Few will be able to read his devastating book without crying or becoming infuriated. Leyton, an anthropologist, focuses especially on MSF work in Rwanda during the genocides of 1994 and 1996, giving not a glossy media report but a down and dirty account, featuring individualized men, women, children, civilians, soldiers, and politicians as well as statistics. Genocide, he argues, is civilization's main tool for neatening populations and boundaries, and far from being a primitive invention or an African aberration, it is a European practice, begun by the 1895 and 1915 Turkish genocides of the Armenians. Black-and-white and color photos add much to Leyton's forceful, eye-opening text. William Beatty

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