Hope and healing
As Afghanistan’s prospects of peace seem even more remote than before the war on terror, Stuff Circuit meets a doctor who offers hope – and new limbs.
Dr Alberto Cairo is busy serving tea and apologises. ‘‘People say my tea is too weak – that it’s women’s tea – but it’s how I like it, I’m sorry,’’ he says, with his Italian lilt.
In a country shattered by death and mayhem, Dr Alberto, as he’s known, pours us a watery brew of green tea and cardamom. It seems the last thing deserving of an apology. And, besides, it’s quite drinkable, a calming tonic before we talk about the horrors of war.
It’s October 2019, and Stuff Circuit is in Afghanistan to film
Life and Limb, a documentary about injuries and deaths caused by unexploded ammunition left behind on New Zealand firing ranges in the province of Bamyan.
We want to see the impacts on the living of the seemingly ceaseless war in this country, so we’ve come to Dr Alberto’s clinic in Kabul, run by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Down a street lined with exquisite carpets and rugs for sale; along Silo Road, named for the Soviet-era grainery and gigantic bread factory which dominates the view; past a man with a donkey pulling a cart laden with pumpkins; past the hospital that was bombed, to the clinic’s entrance and a sign which says ‘‘no weapons’’.
And inside, this whirlwind of a man.
Dr Alberto has been here for almost 30 years, running the clinic which makes and fits prosthetic limbs. He wears a white medical coat and a kind face framed by a flop of grey hair. A former lawyer, he had an epiphany in his 30s and decided to follow his passion – physiotherapy. He went back to school, left his native Italy and headed to Africa, and then came to Afghanistan. He’s been here ever since.
This is where people who’ve been caught up in the conflict in Afghanistan – the direct victims of war, Dr Alberto calls them – get help.
Every year, 1000 new patients who fit that category come to this clinic from all over the country. Anyone and everyone is treated – including the Taliban: their limbs get blown off too, of course. Which possibly offers the clinic a kind of protection – it won’t be bombed when the insurgents also need its services. But if the Taliban expects priority, it’s not given.
‘‘Then they calm down. Disability is a leveller. We never have any problems. Never, never, never, never,’’ he says, before admitting there has been one argument. ‘‘It was over the television remote. So we removed the television.’’
And we’re immediately caught up in the impossible energy of Dr Alberto.
There’s a man who’s difficult to see over the dashboard because he’s at road level, sitting – it appears at first glance – on a skateboard-like contraption, in the middle of a busy road, facing down the relentless Kabul traffic. A truck is approaching and he weaves out of its path at the last second, with the ease of familiarity. He’s clearly used to this.
It’s then, as he moves further away, you realise he’s not in fact sitting; it just looks like it because he has no legs. The contraption is his mobility, and he’s in the traffic because he’s begging, rapping at car windows, pleading for money.
We see him almost every time we venture on to the streets of Kabul – his favourite haunts are near where we’re staying – and his desperate eyes are haunting. Because you know that here, in Afghanistan, he has no choice but to beg. There’s no welfare system to speak of for the disabled. It’s his only way to survive, and it’s awful to witness.
The awfulness is compounded by the fact that people like him are everywhere. It’s impossible to count the number of beggars in Kabul; they’re at every street corner, every gridlocked roundabout, anywhere there are people and therefore a chance to attract sympathy enough to make some cash.
A boy who looks about 6 is carrying a smoking metal tin, urging us to wind down our car windows so he can waft in some incense – for a fee. There’s a girl even younger, maybe 4, dirty and alone – but she doesn’t have anything to sell; she simply puts her hands together in the international sign for ‘‘please’’ and looks at us with beseeching brown eyes.
The hopeless and helpless, and among them, in disturbingly high numbers, those who are, like skateboard guy, disabled: obviously so, given their missing limbs.
There’s a reason for this. If the harrowing physical evidence isn’t enough, you can see it written in the Global Peace Index, a leader board of sorts prepared every year by the Institute for Economics and Peace. It’s a list no country would wish to top.
Afghanistan does, though, this year overtaking Syria as the most dangerous country in the world, or the way the index puts it, the ‘‘least peaceful’’. The index measures the economic cost of violence: in Afghanistan’s case, equivalent to a staggering 47 per cent of GDP.
Dr Alberto is taking a break from the admin; ‘‘the budget is killing me’’. The lights flicker in and out – power is not stable here. The phone rings and he converses in perfect Dari, as if it were his native tongue.
But we’re here for a reason and so Dr Alberto keeps the conversation short because he’s eager to guide us on a tour.
We’ve only just stepped outside his office when we witness one of the achievements of which he’s most proud: almost every staff member we encounter is an amputee. Of the 302 people working here, 287 are former patients, many of them victims of landmines or explosive remnants of war.
‘‘It’s a strategy,’’ he says. ‘‘Maybe you come here and you are depressed, and then the person who opens the door for you is without a hand, the receptionist is in a wheelchair, the technician is without two legs. If they succeeded, you can too.’’
He says these things with an expressive, expansive enthusiasm.
‘‘One of them [a double amputee] is my hero. He has very short stumps but he walks everywhere, sometimes with a stick. A disabled person given the right opportunity, they can do anything.’’
But he also speaks of the need for positive discrimination in jobs outside here. ‘‘We cannot employ everybody.’’
Dr Alberto is taking us through a noisy workshop where prosthetics are being crafted from scratch.
He tells us they could buy these from Germany, but, at an average cost of NZ$550, it’s cheaper to make them here.
‘‘How much did [former South African sprinter and murderer]
Oscar Pistorius’ blades cost?’’ he asks us. ‘‘I’ll tell you. $25,000 for each one.’’
In a curtained-off cubicle a clinic staffer painstakingly measures a man’s leg stump (which, typically for a landmine victim, is amputated below the knee) then wraps a plaster cast for a mould from which his prosthetic can be made. ‘‘Prostheses for landmine victims,’’ Dr Alberto tells us, ‘‘it changes so much your life.’’
But that’s the thing. These people’s lives were changed in the first instance by something left behind. It’s a subject which angers Dr Alberto, and his already rapidfire speech accelerates.
‘‘These victims of war and how they came to be injured? It’s terrible because we know armies have left behind so much unexploded ordnance. Shame on them. Really. Shame on them.’’
And to New Zealand directly, given the revelations in Life and
Limb that unexploded ordnance left behind on the New Zealand PRT firing ranges are linked to the deaths and injuries of 17 civilians: ‘‘You came here to help and you’re leaving behind these things. Every army has an obligation to clean, to remove what they brought in. If you know you have left something behind, do anything you can to clean it. Clean up your mess.’’
Perhaps his words resonated, because Life and Limb had barely been published when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern publicly scolded the Defence Force, and said work to clear the firing ranges should begin in earnest.
It feels more dangerous now than it did when we were last in Afghanistan, in 2017. Then, there was a latent sense of threat; always a chance of an insurgent bomb attack or kidnapping. But it seems worse this time.
Local people speak of living under a self-imposed curfew, fearing venturing into the dark after 7pm. There’s a sniper on the roof of our guest house, there to protect us, the visitors. He wasn’t there two years ago. Fighting between the Taliban and security forces has intensified. Things have deteriorated.
You can tell by the topics of casual conversation that the threat is not academic; there’s not much talk about the weather. It’s early morning and our driver, as ever assertively threading and beeping his way through the nightmarish traffic, is talking about an attack in the news today: a bomb being detonated inside a university classroom in Ghazni province, wounding 19 students. ‘‘Crazy, these people,’’ he says, and then he goes quiet.
Such acts of violence happen with terrifying regularity, and while they go largely unreported elsewhere, they give context to why this room Dr Alberto is taking us to is so busy: it’s full of people learning to walk again.
You might think this would be a sad sight, with so much lost. But it’s not, at all, and when you watch Dr Alberto with the patients, you sense how much of that is down to him, and the locals people he’s trained.
‘‘It’s a very special place,’’ he says, ‘‘because when people come here they are full of hope – they know it is almost done.’’
There’s a little girl, maybe 4, wearing a pink sweater, proudly marching up and down the room. But Dr Alberto is worried that maybe her artificial leg is too short; there’s something in the way she’s walking. So he and a colleague carefully measure it, and the length is fine. It must be just that this is new to her.
We come back an hour later and she’s still walking – down and back, down and back – with an air of unstoppable confidence. And already, her gait has improved.
And in the lanes beside her, a young man, in his late teens, with a perfect haircut and suit with one leg rolled up, striding out with his new leg.
There’s a 21-year-old police officer who stepped out of his vehicle on to something that exploded, losing a leg, an arm and an eye. He’s walking slowly, with a new limb, and crutches, and a patch over his missing eye.
And there’s an older gentleman who is palpably delighted with the mobility his new leg gives him; he can’t stop smiling. He’s beaming straight at us. We have no language in common, but none is needed.
In this, his 30th year in Afghanistan, Dr Alberto is proud as he tells us how a few months ago he was granted honorary citizenship. So now, unusually for a foreigner, he has an Afghanistan passport, meaning he can come and go as he pleases. He doesn’t, much, though. He finds it difficult being home in Italy.
‘‘When I go back, there’s plenty of things I like: cinema, good restaurants. But I don’t fit any more. When I’m in Italy for one, two, three weeks, it’s boring.’’
His family is back home, but he has no plans to return.
‘‘I have to be honest. I have never felt so useful as here. I have purpose. I’m grateful for it.
‘‘My life is here.’’