Mar 25.13
Pulled the muslin gauze over the face of a fifteen year old boy, and walked away from the wails, down the hospital’s dark halls to find some air. In a doorway a woman with bright sequins on her hijab smiled at me, a beautiful baby on her hip. Framed by a window, two lovers held hands, looking at the city that stretched below. I put my hands on the sill beside them, and leaned out. The air was sweet.

Welcome to the broken, beating heart of the world. Not Ethiopia, I mean, but the one inside this present moment. Thing is, you can’t hold it back even if you try, so you let it in and it does its thing, breaks you down, brick by brick, until there is nothing left between you and it, and just then, at your most vulnerable, it surrenders itself to you in a sweet embrace, holds you in the perpetual centre, moves you, whispers “it will be ok, even death, even that. ” Maybe, if you’re lucky, even that whisper fades. On that day: freedom.

Though this may be my belief alone, I believe we are seeking something, each of us, in every sentence and every action, buzz around it like moths do a bright light. How honest we are with what we are looking for is how close we come to finding it. I believe, what we seek, is freedom from the ties that bind, that stop us from connecting fully with the source of all things, from letting love pass through fully, fearlessly. For me, that is what the Grandest Challenges speaks to. Framed in the language of health and the body, it is why we want to be well. Though the work is often at the level of particular diseases, it must also be at the barriers that stand in the way of people doing it for themselves, at the injustices that let the suffering of so many serve the purpose of a privileged few, holds them from joining their ranks as surely as their malaria does sick in bed.

The largest example of this, for me, is in war. My first taste of it was as a brand new doctor, working with a recently surrendered group of Khmer Rouge in the south of Cambodia….

one saturday night, in dadaab, we stood in a puddle around stacked soda crates, a goat sizzling over coals beside us, when the three, buzzed-out speakers in the canteen started to play this song and the same dozen cast of characters that i share my hospital days and compound nights with drifted to the tent, and danced, grinning, mud between their bare toes.

soon, it was only me and one of the departing three for whom the party was held leaning on the red cubes of coca-cola, and we agreed that there was no club in new york city that was better than this one, none where you could dance so sincerely, freed completely from the fear that there might be another, better way to spend your time.