Thursday 13 January 2011

As if in answer

At lunchtime today I heard a talk in Battersea by a psychiatrist called Dr Hughes (who looks and sounds rather like the late Anthony Clare). Dr Hughes has just returned from Haiti where he lived in a tent and saw around him the most extreme suffering imaginable: people who had lost everything, their friends, their families - amazed still to be alive themselves.

A psychiatrist of course has to deal with people who have received more suffering than they can bear.

Amongst the lifeless bodies that lay around, he saw a three-year old child trying to talk to his dead father on a mobile phone.

When Dr Hughes arrived, there was no government, society had broken down, kidnapping was rife (worse than anywhere else in the world) and young men, morally derelict from the tension, were raping the young girls.

Yet he wants to be there more than he wants to be here. The people of Haiti are proud of their country. They are deeply religious, and in spite of all that has happened, believe profoundly in God.

Alleviating even a tiny part of the suffering can awaken and enlighten the one helping as well as the helped.

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