In the deadly streets of Mogadishu, it was just another random tragedy. A stray bullet, fired by one of the thousands of soldiers and rebels at the front lines, flew through the air for more than a kilometre – and then hit a four-year-old toddler in the head.
He was rushed to a hospital at the African Union military base, where the first paramedic to reach him was Edward Parsons, a Canadian specialist in battlefield wounds.
“The bullet didn’t even penetrate the skull, it was just a glancing blow,” he said. But “the sheer shock wave that comes off high-velocity ammunition these days – it compresses the tissue and cells start exploding.”
Mr. Parsons and other intensive-care staff battled for 36 hours to save the child, but nothing could be done. He is grimly silent for a few moments as he thinks about the boy’s death. “Mogadishu is not always conducive to happy endings,” he says finally.
“It should be horrifying. It should be shocking. But stories like this – they just make me feel really, really tired.”
Mr. Parsons, a tall gruff-voiced 38-year-old veteran of war zones and natural disasters, is an emergency specialist in perhaps the world’s most dangerous city. He runs the Mogadishu’s firefighting department. He supervises security at the airport. He performs rescue work and medical evacuations. When there are gunshot victims at the hospital, he helps to stop the bleeding, stabilize the patient and patch them up. He is even the Mogadishu venomous snake expert. If anyone finds a puff adder or a spitting cobra on the military base, he is the man they call.
He lives in a metal prefab unit at the African Union base, near the airport runway, and carries a two-way radio with him at all times. When he hears an ambulance racing past on the way to the hospital, he jumps into a jeep and follows. “You can tell by how the ambulance is driving,” he says. “If it’s going really slow or really fast, it means there’s an emergency patient in it, and it’s time to go.”
On a typical day in Mogadishu recently, his morning began with the firefighters, helping them combat a garbage fire that had spread into a military base and sparked small explosions of ammunition. After fighting the blaze and finding a bulldozer to crush the grass fire, he returned to the base and grabbed a quick meal. Then, when he heard an ambulance racing past with a gunshot victim, he rushed to the hospital. He never asks for the details of shootings – this one could have been the war, or it could have been a clan conflict. “This is what happens when everyone has a gun and a temper,” he says.
The rest of his day included the medical evacuation of two injured soldiers, an aviation security meeting to discuss the latest threat intelligence, and a return to the hospital at night to check on the patients.
“I love the challenge,” he says. “I’m absolutely hopeless behind a desk. If you want to do a difficult job in a difficult place, Mogadishu is the pinnacle.”
He admits the job can be depressing. “There are days where it gets dark, and it’s hard to see the light. But it’s my personal connection with my Somali friends that gives me the assurance that there are people who want us here. Underneath, they’re just normal people – if you eliminate the 48-degree heat and the mortar fire in the background.”
Mr. Parsons was raised in the small Manitoba town of Birtle, noted mainly for producing farmers and hockey players. He jokes that he was too slow to play hockey and too lazy to farm. After first visiting Africa as a photographer, he eventually joined a United Nations news service. He was sent to Pakistan to cover the devastating earthquake of 2005, but within a day, he put aside his camera and began helping with rescue and humanitarian work. “In journalism, you’re at arm’s length, and it drove me nuts,” he says.
He joined the UN World Food Program and moved to Mogadishu in early 2008 as its emergency medical co-ordinator, having taken courses in trauma medicine and disaster work. Two years later, he shifted to his current job at the UN support team in Somalia.
He knows Canadians don’t always understand why the UN tries to help people in a seemingly hopeless war such as the one that has raged in Somalia for the past two decades. But he has a simple and eloquent answer. “If your family was in trouble, and you couldn’t be there, you’d want to be sure there were people there to help,” he says.
“You’d be appalled if someone in your home town had an accident and everyone sat around and ignored it. This is just an extension of that. We may not be related, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask that somebody is here to help. Why would we want our family to be helped by strangers, and then wish upon other strangers, by accident of geography, that they have none?”
His adrenalin-charged work in Mogadishu can often produce enormous stress. He says he feels himself “trying to be all things to all people.”
After the four-year-old boy was killed by the stray bullet, he asked for a few days of time off. “Here was a child who had no concept of danger, no ability to protect himself,” he muses. “I wish it was as rare as a lightning strike, but it’s not. For a few days, I don’t want to think about that child and these children. And part of me feels guilty for that. Part of me needs a clean break for a few days.”
He travelled to neighbouring Kenya to rest. But when his leave was over, he was back in Mogadishu, at work again.
Source: The Globe and Mail
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