Dr. Adaha

This morning over breakfast I opened an email from a friend in China. The one-liner read, “Is this your friend?” followed by a link to a BBC news article. I took another bite of blueberry bagel and clicked on the link. I scrolled down and sure enough, buried in a long article about the conflict in North Africa, was his familiar face – dark skin, big teeth, sad eyes. Our friend, Dr. Adaha.  

The article talked about how he stayed in the town we lived in until the last possible minute, (when government troops were finally within shelling range, if what he always said would be go-time turned out to be true), before loading up the ambulance with whatever hospital equipment he could carry and driving across the southern border. But instead of driving on to bigger and better things, he parked that ambulance right in the middle of 80,000 refugees and got to work on gunshot victims and pregnant women. And every once in a while he apparently turns right back around and drives back across the border to carry injured people out – soldiers on his side, solders on their side, civilians, POWs. “Anyone who is desperate” the article quotes him as saying.

God have mercy, this sounds like the man I know.

I wasn’t so sure what to make of him when I first met him. I remember one of the first times I was around him. We were sitting with a few friends on the front porch of their kitchen, swatting mosquitoes as we ate beans and rice out of flimsy plastic plates. Dr. Adaha joined us late, looking worn from his evening rounds at the hospital. But even as he unfolded heavily into a chair he warmed to our conversation and from the many questions tossed his way I could tell he was known for his stories. He told many that night, but the one that has forever stuck in my head, epitomizes all those I have now heard him tell a dozen times or more. With his legs crossed neatly while he ate, Dr. Adaha told us of a battalion of rebel soldiers he had attended to during the war. They were badly beaten in a battle deep in the bush and he was rushed out to treat them. There he found men ripped apart by bullets, bleeding to death in the middle of nowhere. “There was this one guy whose intestines were all spilling out of him,” he said matter-of-factly that night while he chewed his beans. “And he wanted to die so badly that he had stuffed dirt and grass into his open wound.” As he described the man’s injuries, Dr. Adaha started to laugh. “He was so miserable, that he actually tried to kill himself by putting grass in his body…” His eyes squinted tightly and his body shook with laughter. I remember staring at my plate in horror that night and thinking, this guy is crazy.  

And he is. At least by some standards. In a world where he could be making a ton of money in a nice hospital, he lives on the salary supplied by a relief organization (when they haven’t already evacuated). When he could be living in a comfortable home with his wife and three sons, he sleeps in a mud hut alone and thousands of miles away from his family. When he could cash in his seventeen years of noble efforts in difficult place for well-deserved praise and rest, he earns his heroism by working eighteen hours days in a refugee camp most people less educated than him simply visit. Stark raving mad. And I don’t know if I have ever met anyone more inspiring.

In two and a half years of living next door to Dr. Adaha, I came to love his stories. I never failed to be surprised at the things he would laugh at and the things he would not. He once swore the crocodile in the river near his boyhood home was sixty feet long, sixty feet, and he looked positively annoyed when I burst into laughter at the tale. But he could speak of a child soldier shooting a verbally abusive POW in the head and chuckle like he had just told a great joke. But I came to realize that when he laughed at these narratives of intense human suffering, he did not expect me, or anyone else to. He laughed because he had been there. And we had not. He laughed because, really…what else do you do? It seems like when your choices are to laugh a little or to sit in the dirt with your head in your hands and weep, some days, most days, you will choose to laugh. Then you wipe your eyes, and get back to pouring your life into some of the hardest, greatest work imaginable.

The past couple of weeks Bryan and I have been encouraged to see progress in our own plans. I will share more details soon but for now it looks like we may be working with the same community of refugees that Dr. Adaha is in the near future. Which means that someday soon I may be hearing some of his stories again. And I have this deep feeling, somewhere between terror and hope, that maybe one day I can have the great honor of laughing with him.   

(To see the BBC article about Dr. Adaha click here )