Doc provides a striking glimpse of Africa’s struggles
It’s impossible not to react with horror and sadness while watching Triage: Dr. James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma . Director Patrick Reed ( Shake Hands with the Devil ) chronicles the return of Orbinski to the places he toiled as a field doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) amid unspeakable atrocities in the ’90s. Working in Rwanda Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo Orbinski struggled to provide medical attention to the victims of savage civil wars that resulted in close to one million people starving to death or being systematically slaughtered.
Orbinski is soft-spoken and compassionate easily moved to laughter and playful with his young daughters. This contrasts sharply with his steely determination to alert the world to the ongoing humanitarian crises it faces. When speaking of what he calls the global indifference towards Somalia in the early ’90s his voice quivers with rage. In the next scene he embraces his old friend Lesto hugging him with unbridled affection when they reunite in Somalia after 15 years.
Orbinski travels back to the hospitals where the gutters once ran with blood and packs of wild dogs fed on the corpses of slaughtered civilians. As he recounts a jarring episode where he attempted to suture the wounds of a woman who had been methodically butchered with a machete he chokes on his words and his tragic blue eyes brim with tears.
He makes no attempt to suppress the starkness of his experience but relives it with a sense of presence and responsibility. His pending memoir has been described as controversial no doubt due to his unwillingness to accept the status quo and his obvious disdain for the politics that allowed the genocides to happen.
Reed captures with precision the tragedy of life in the neglected refugee camps. It is painful to watch. His real triumph though lies in his intimate depiction of Orbinski at once tragic and heroic and profoundly conflicted in the face of inhumane situations.
It’s impossible not to choke up at the sight of emaciated children waiting silently for food scraps at refugee camps. Orbinski notes he can’t suppress the memory he has of those days in Somalia when thousands of displaced people waited patiently for food that never came poached by warlords.
"That’s what I remember the most is the silence" he says.
