I'm truly very glad our dear friend Anthony Deutsch
lived to tell the story of his personal encounter with a particularly nasty type
of malaria in East Timor.
His account of his stay at the local hospital,
where he was taken, is rather vivid, despite his soaring fever and
his feeling extremely ill. I suppose it takes a journalist to pick up the local
colour, even in such circumstances.
Nevertheless, it puzzles me, how a reporter, who
has been working and traveling extensively in non-western, third
world countries, could have been so fundamentally shocked by this very personal
and direct confrontation with a (well known) world-wide killer like malaria, as
well as by finding himself amid extreme poverty, lack of hygiene and local
customs
His story sounds like he had never really noticed
or realized the struggle of daily life in such parts of the
world before. Knowing him I can't imagine this to be true, so it must be
attributed to his feverish disorientation at the time.
While refugees, crying babies and general
mayhem crowded his immediate surroundings due to the ugly violence in East
Timor, he received, however, the proper medical care from local
doctors, promptly and effectively. In that respect, I found his account of the
American physician, shouldering his way in by phone, quite
humorous.
He is of course not the first reporter or for that
matter aid worker or soldier, who experienced a personal emergency while working
abroad. Some wrote books about it or gave interviews in talkshows back
home.
Some go deeper, but most of these stories
are interesting only insofar they show where, when en how the preoccupation with
the Western self emerges from under the thin layer of good intentions and
involvement.
Please give my best wishes to Anthony.
Regards,
Marianne Schaper.
scha-bru@planet.nl
scha-bru@planet.nl
