Doctor Mehret

Just read a BBC article on yet another famine in Ethiopia and watched the video ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7444753.stm ). Anytime Ethiopia is in the news the visual images are usually flies on babies. As a daughter of Ethiopia, living in the land of plenty, these images always leave me with mixed feelings. I either want to buy my plane ticket tomorrow and start working there, or I think about the countless Ethiopian stories of triumph that never make it to a public stage. In both scenarios there are fragments of my human identity: guilt and pride. Being a physician changes my views on both.

Guilt has no therapeutic utility in the physician-patient interaction. In fact, it gets in the way of healing because it obscures the path to the solution. The fact is, we know what to do in order to get Ethiopia fed. The same agrarian revolution that happened in India thirty years ago needs to happen in Ethiopia. What are we waiting for? Pictures of more flies on babies? Perhaps we should reverse the gaze to confront our own role in allowing this tragedy to continue despite the unprecedented wealth and knowledge of the 21st century. Perhaps the flies are clouding our own vision… not the babies’.

Pride is equally useless to me as a physician. The patient is the teacher…end of story. In order to heal, I have to listen and translate the unadulterated truth from the perspective of the patient. You ever wonder what a baby covered with flies would say? Put away your camera and feed me.