Touched by Fire: Doctors Without Borders in a Third World Crisis

Les Harding is the author of Exploring the Avalon, Historic St.
John’s: The City of Legends, The Voyages of Lesser Men: Thumbnail
Sketches in Canadian Exploration and The Journeys of Remarkable Women:
Their Travels on the Canadian Frontier.

This is the story of the selfless men and women of Doctors Without
Borders (Médecins Sans Frontiиres, or MSF). MSF is an emergency aid
organization founded in France, with branches in a number of countries,
including Canada. It has given itself a mandate—simple to state but
difficult to carry out—of providing food, water, sanitation, and
medical assistance to whoever needs it, wherever they are in the world,
as quickly as possible. In a catastrophe, MSF teams are often the first
on the ground, usually in advance of those dispatched by the
bureaucratic United Nations. Be it plague, drought, famine, massacre, or
flood, MSF aims to be there with emergency aid within 24 hours.

Touched by Fire is mostly about MSF’s work in Rwanda during the
genocide of 1994, when as many as a million people were hacked to death
in a hundred days of madness, and then in 1996, when hundreds of
thousands of Rwandan refugees suddenly flooded back to their homes.

The people of MSF are probably as close as we get to heroes, although
they would certainly deny it. Under Leyton’s gaze they are dedicated
beyond belief but hardly saintly. They are only too painfully aware of
the moral ambiguities of what they do. For instance, is there any point
in saving a child’s life today when it will probably be murdered by a
death squad as soon as they leave?

Accompanying the text and telling a story of their own are the
striking, often haunting photographs by Greg Locke.

Touched by Fire is a well-written, superbly illustrated book that will
stay with the reader for a long, long time.