Gino Strada is an Italian war surgeon and founder of the humanitarian, charity-based NGO Emergency.  Starting out as a heart-lung transplant surgeon in the 1980’s, Gino has always believed that healthcare is a human right.  It was this belief that led him to abandon his posh position in the United States in 1988, and begin working for the Red Cross in the conflict zones of Pakistan, Ethiopia, Peru, Afghanistan, Somalia and Bosnia. And it was this belief that led him in 1994 to establish Emergency, a “small, agile, highly specialized” humanitarian medical organization that would provide free, high-quality medical and surgical treatment to victims of war, landmines, and poverty.  Since 1994, the organization (currently active in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Iraq, Italy, Sierra Leone, the Sudan, & Uganda) has worked in 16 countries (most of them heavily war-torn) — building hospitals, first aid posts, surgical centers, rehabilitation centers, and pediatric clinics.   And to this day, Emergency doctors have provided life-saving assistance, completely free of charge, to over 8.5 million victims of war, over 90% of them civilians; almost all of them extremely poor.

“Whoever speaks about ‘humanitarian war’ should be eligible for a long stay in a psychiatric institution. It’s complete nonsense. No matter what people say or think, the end result is that 90% of victims are civilians … War must completely disappear from human civilization, the very same way that slavery must disappear from human civilization.  Today the concept of slavery is disturbing.  War should disturb us equally … When you operate on children and teenagers, you ask yourself what the hell do they have to do with war? I mean, they don’t even know why a war is fought around them, and they don’t even really know who’s fighting whom” ~ Gino Strada

Filed under: In LOVE with Humanity by Scaughdt