francais

The French have got the answers, at least some of them, when it comes to aid intervention. Most French agencies believe in the real concepts of solidarity and humanitarian assistance as the foremost principles of aid intervention. The Americans and the British look on humanitarian assistance as secondary with all sorts of other motivations in mind, monetary and political. The French, to put it succintly, operate without AGENDA.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) remains as one of the foremost emergency medical aid agencies reaching high-intensity conflict zones and working in some of the most dangerous areas of the globes. If I was a doctor, that is the kind of doctor I would be. Or at least hope to be.

I'm at a crossroads of self-definition. The real heroes are these unsung aid workers, that work in remote countries, without the help of common languages or cultures, that work day and night to provide life-saving procedures, that are constantly exhausted in both body and spirit. Like as my CEO said, when someone in Rwanda falls unconscious into a coma and thinks he's about to die and wakes up alive to see a French doctor smiling at him, that is the stuff that heroes are made of. And it happens every day, all around us, as the rest of us continue with our humdrum lives.

I'd like to dedicate this to those aid workers, who have given up everything that is faithful and familiar, to exert themselves, to push the boundaries of what is their comfort zone, who give their life's work in the service of humanity, who exhaust themselves without end and without expectation of reward, who persevere despite seeing more in one the day than most of us would see in a lifetime, above all for believing in the best of mankind and not the worst. They are the truest heroes of the contemporary world.