For nearly six years, Dominique Schwartz roamed the globe, meeting people as a Foreign Correspondent reporter. These three left the deepest impressions, she writes.
We returned the next day to see how the boys were faring. Only one was still alive, an uncle by his bedside. The man launched into a stinging rebuke. Why hadn't we bought medicines as we said we would?
A decade later, I found myself back in a hospital for Foreign Correspondent, again surrounded by people needing life-saving surgery. This time, however, it was a good-news story about Indian cardiac surgeon and champion for the poor, Dr Devi Prasad Shetty. His Bollywood good looks didn't hurt, of course, but there wasn't a hint of hubris. Just quiet strength and humility. His inspiration, he said, came from a former patient: Mother Teresa.
"I am doing exactly what I am supposed to do but people consider that it's a generosity and it's a charity," Dr Shetty told us. "I am just doing my duty as any other individual but, unfortunately, overall, society is degraded to such a level that just being a normal human being is considered godly." We were doing a story on the government's push to end the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation , the ritualistic removal of part or all of a girl's external genitalia.
I'd come across Agirata grinding maize on a large flat rock in a compound ringed by small, circular, clay-brick houses with thatched conical roofs. Next to her was her tiny, doll-like daughter, Balkissa, in a white dress with red frills. At five years old, she was soon to undergo FGM — or excision as it was known there.
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