hope resurrected

I heard about Doctors Without Borders for the first time from my friend Ralf whom I met in a dance club outside Johannesburg in 1998. On this particular evening, my fellow architecture students press-ganged me into taking a break from another twenty-hour day of producing blue-prints.

My exhausted body enjoyed the intoxicating energy of the crowd and the smoky smell of a normal life outside the sterile design-studio felt like something sacred, an undeserved moment of liberation to consciously appreciate. My mind however continued to haunt me about how much time I was wasting by being here instead of making my own deadlines. Graduation lay only four months away and I looked forward to escaping from my hometown.

While my mates were dancing off the side-effects of caffeine and lesser known sleep-depressants to Insomnia I decided to take it easy. Sitting alone amidst a tangle of bodiless arms putting down empty beer cans and indecisive hands holding used cigarettes in desperate need of an ashtray, I enjoyed the simple delight of watching ice cubes roll around in a single tot of J&B whiskey.

A stressed out female voice to the left of me caught my attention confirming that this table had reached its capacity. A dark haired man profusely apologized in a strange accent and looked up at me with his bright eyes begging for assistance in this cultural misunderstanding.

I interrupted the situation and distracted the Stetson-wearing lady into directing her toward the restrooms. That was how my friendship with Ralf began. At first I played along with his introduction of how he studied medicine in Germany and had flown into the country the day before. Still skeptical about this original pick-up line, I believed more about his expectations to complete a four month of surgery-internship at the Kalafong Hospital outside Pretoria. We ended up exchanging phone numbers on bright red Brutal Fruit coasters using a borrowed pen eagerly offered by one of the two gay guys who also shared this particular table in the room.

This surprise connection with daily stories of emergency room procedures, unhelpful nurses demanding their tea-break and getting lost in the supplies store looking for IV’s resuscitated my passion for relieving the suffering of people under desperate circumstances.

I had applied for Med-school seven years earlier without success but sneaked into the Pathology Museum whenever I found access to the medical campus just to disappear into the mysterious world of physiology and human composition for a few hours.

On Sunday afternoons I joined a group of medical students from our church in visiting the Pretoria Academic Hospital’s children’s ward―just smiling at or holding hands of some of the more serious patients and playing games with the healthier ones.

My most treasured memory about this unobtainable fantasy related to participating in an anatomy class one time. I was the first of the class to identify the one-way heart valves because they resembled a typical cable-design-principle which she had studied under the Structural Engineering department. At that moment she resolved to accept that destiny did not agree with my aspirations of becoming a physician and conceded to a life of dusty building sites and rude contractors.

Eight years later in a downtown apartment in Dallas, Texas, I still felt restless as I stared at my laptop. Pressing the send button below the online-application, I opened the door once again toward fulfilling an almost forgotten dream.