Dr. Mukwege breaks the silence in Porto Alegre by FRONTEIRAS DO PENSAMENTO

Dr. Mukwege breaks the silence in Porto Alegre by FRONTEIRAS DO PENSAMENTO
Denis Mukwege and Marcos Rolim (clik on the picture above - part 1)

A Quixote in the Heart of Africa

A Quixote in the Heart of Africa

By
Milton Paulo de Oliveira


- You want to operate Congolese children?

Before I could ask "Where? Professor Pedro Martins, my boss at the Hospital of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), shot:

- No need to answer now, but I think these things have everything to do with you.

Thus began one afternoon in May 2008, a story that would last into the heart of Africa and, for me, is far from over. She would know one of the most remarkable human beings I have news, Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege, speaker of the evening of next Monday in the third part of the cycle Frontiers of Thought.

At the moment I received the invitation to go to Congo, I was mentoring of residents in plastic surgery clinic in the hospital. We serve on average about one hundred people per shift, which are routed by the Unified Health System Just came back I remember the conversation in the evening when he dined with his family.
- I was invited to work in Africa - said.
- How so? - Deisy said, my wife.
I reported the conversation in the hospital. Before he could continue, my son, Felipe, 10 years at the time, interrupted:
- Operate whom, father?
- Children.
Just wanted to tell them they could not accept the invitation because it was impossible to get away from work for 30 days. There should be dozens of other reasons, but could not remember any moment. And then my daughter, Fernanda, eight years, dealt the final blow:
- Father, you do not like doing this?
- Of course I like.
- So why do not you go?
The other day, I sought Professor Pedro Martins and accepted the invitation.
- I knew you would accept - he told me, with your style that does not waste words.
I had less than one month to prepare for the trip. The Smile Train international humanitarian organization, which promoted the mission, had made available to our department of plastic surgery a wave of surgeon to operate on a voluntary basis, children with facial deformities - specifically cleft lip and palate, known as cleft lip - in the Democratic Republic of Congo . The Smile Train (Trem do Sorriso, in Portuguese) was created in the United States in 1999 and has restored the smile to more than 400 000 children in 77 countries, an activity funded by donations.
As a surgeon, I consider myself fit for the job. Moreover, the Congo was to me a country practically unknown. Information about where it would operate had become an obsession. Thereafter, I received information from the European office of the Smile Train in Rome. Days later, I was informed that the plastic surgeon Italian Flavio Abenavolli, responsible for the Italian arm of the organization and who shortly before had been operating on a child in Baghdad, Iraq, had contracted a disease and could not accompany me to the Congo. Now yes, I thought. It would be rookie and head of a mission that had little evidence of technical conditions we would face.
It was the Abenavolli I spent the first coordinated. Would operate in a town called Bukavu, to be visited first by the Smile Train. That put me as rookie, on a par with the organization as far as the Congo, but certainly not reassured me. My team would include a Congolese nurse who worked in Rome and would be part of the mission - other such journeys were preceded like a batter that investigates local conditions when the scene was still unknown. The absence of Abenavolli allowed the group to incorporate other Brazilian surgeon, my good friend Pablo Pase, who had his training as a plastic surgeon at PUC and had just completed graduate studies in maxillofacial surgery in Sao Paulo. Always liked the reconstructive surgery, and never ran from any liability attributed to him.
Restless, I realized how much information received, plus increased my doubts. More difficulties arise: the representation of Congo in Brasilia had no ambassador, and the release of visas stumbled on little knowledge of the Portuguese officials, who communicated in French with extensive bureaucracy. I made contact with the Brazilian ambassador in Kinshasa the capital of Congo. After the surprise to learn that we were going to eastern Congo, south of Lake Kivu, Ambassador Flavio Bonzanini volunteered to help us get the visas, which came into our hands two days prior to departure for Rome.
After asking that we keep very careful on the trip, Bonzanini explained that the Congo was a country rich in mineral resources, but with an extremely poor population. Eastern boundary, where we have done our job, there was civil war, corruption, sexual violence and atrocities against women of all ages, which were not matched in any time or place in history. The conflict gave rise to a nefarious army of child soldiers and girls as sex slaves were forced to follow their tormentors in battles and massacres. After a kind of armistice in 2004, war was considered closed in Congo, but this only increased the clash between armed factions, violence and social disorder. The supposed causes of war - if it ever existed - have dissipated, leaving only the actions of extreme violence. The Brazilian ambassador himself was besieged in 2007 in Brazil's embassy in Kinshasa, during the invasion of the city by the rebels.
In Rome, we met the team - seven people, all Italian, except for the Congolese nurse. The group included an anesthesiologist, a coordinator and nurses. The surgical equipment, which pack in the office of the Smile Train, was of excellent quality. To my relief, we would operate at University Hospital in Bukavu. At that moment, I could not resist and asked:
- How do we get to Bukavu?
Paola, coordinator of the group, shot in English that we would fly to Kigali, Rwanda, with a stopover in Addis Adeba, Ethiopia, and then would follow the earth toward the border with the Congo, because the airspace in the region was not very safe. Once in the Congo, would be housed in a monastery in Bukavu. I thought to ask something else but in the end, I realized that she had fully responded to my inquiry.
Rwanda is a tiny country east of the giant Congo, surpassing in size all over Western Europe. A Toyota, a driver and a Congolese doctor awaited us at the airport in Kigali to cross the country toward the Congo. On a sunny morning, we followed the truck packed with a perfectly paved road. Our physician host Tchomba, told me that he worked at the hospital in Bukavu, were made and many surgeries he had drained a cerebral hematoma.
Over time, the road narrowed, the asphalt scarce, the holes appeared and soon became craters. The dust rose. Begin to be stopped by groups armed with AK-47s, camouflage gear and no currency.
- Stay here and wait - Tchomba said at the first barrier
Those people seemed opposed. They spoke very little, in contrast to the driver, who spoke softly in Swahili, but without stopping. There were moments of silence observed by the negotiators on both sides, and then resumed the blah-blah-blah. The armed men looked suspicious to our boxes lined with medical supplies, sealed with large padlocks.
Suddenly, silence again. Our driver walked away from the man who seemed to lead the group and, without saying anything, went into the Toyota and drove off very slowly. This would happen several times during our trip to the border.
- Rebels - Tchomba told me when I asked who were those men.
The militiamen belonged to various armed factions in Rwanda and the regions that were cruising "belonged" to those groups. Nevertheless, we were not molested, and the driver seemed very safe during the stops. There is no electricity, and total darkness of the region was enclosed only by the headlights of the truck which, at this point, the winding road full of craters. Children, many children crossing the road. The villages along the road were multiplied, and in them people flocked to see the Toyota.
Upon reaching the border of Congo in the late evening, a surprise: the passage was blocked. We would cross it the other day, only after much talk in English, Swahili, French, Italian, and obviously with the Portuguese Customs Rwandan soldiers diminished. Thus we come to Bukavu, the more excited than tired before the expectation of work.
Upon arriving at the University Hospital of Bukavu, we find families camped for days in front of the building with the hope of getting treatment for their children, most with cleft lip and palate. They were not the only ones we expect. Profiled at the entrance of little old hospital, were officials, doctors, local authorities and even the university president. In an anteroom, heard almost the whole group will succeed in speeches.
- Where will the surgery room? - Asked Pablo.
At this time, led us to know the hospital. Everyone wanted to show rooms, tables and old beds stacked along the wall. Facing a room that seemed to be in surgical, one kid looked at us with casual curiosity. The room was large by Brazilian standards, but there was no light, water and equipment such as oxygen and anesthesia equipment. The shock was great, but we could not kick. Doctors and other residents wanted to know what we had found the hospital and when they begin to operate. We gathered the group and decided to try to get what was missing, even in neighboring countries. Our group has shown remarkable cohesion and solidarity. In two days, to the relief of everyone, children begin to operate with a set of rudimentary anesthesia.
Difficulties changed their name every day. We were in the service of an organization called the Smile Train in a land of sad-eyed children, and of tender and shy ways. Smile, we would see only in very young children who probably had no notion of the world around them, warped by war, genocide, hunger, deprivation, violence and sexual atrocities that turned children into soldiers. And, as he began to think that our effort to treat those children was tragically unnecessary, met on a Saturday morning Dr. Denis Mukwege, via the official UN Grunaum Berta.
Mukwege received us on the porch of his home with a grin. Showed immediate interest for the mission, but also talked about the difficulties encountered by their surgical patients at the Hospital of Panzi - most women victims of sexual abuse - and how enthusiastically tried to solve them. The scenario described by Mukwege was devastating, but never heard the man moaning. When you leave your house, we are sure to have known someone simple and kind, but also represented the maximum potential of the union of two words: "being" and "human."
During the two years since I separated from the Africa trip, I learned a lot about this 55 years of Congolese, who became internationally known after 2008. He is a visionary, humanitarian and courageous doctor who is on the front line of a brutal war in the heart of Africa. A war that, over the past 10 years, left about six million dead and hundreds of thousands of women raped and tortured. The international community, in the midst of one of the worst atrocities and violence that has seen this century, until recently showed an inexplicable indifference. Mukwege used his life to protect women, the main victims of any war, and children. He could have left the Congo where the conflict began, more than 10 years, like many of his countrymen. Preferred to stay.
After completing training in obstetrics and gynecology in France Mukwege began in 1989 to pursue his craft in the Hospital of Lemera. This was the first hospital to be attacked by rebels in war. Was completely destroyed, and several of its doctors and patients were brutally murdered. Like other refugees, Mukwege tried to rebuild their lives in Bukavu, where he founded and directs the Panzi Hospital. At this location, performs reconstructive surgeries on women victims of sexual violence and torture caused by endless armed conflicts.
Besides accumulating vast experience in treating this kind of patient, Mukwege created a community for women and girls who have been cured in Panzi, because users do not have more family or prospects of social reintegration after being raped. The family of the victims who have only hope of regaining dignity, it is. Despite the war, atrocities, the most varied human rights abuses in his country, has Mukwege love as the only weapon to keep intact the faith in humanity, while continuing to do their work unconditionally and relentless. Has demonstrated the value of social medicine to the point that we can not separate, in your example, the physician of being human. If, unfortunately, that marriage breaks, the medicine will no longer be medicine.
In 2008, Mukwege won the awards of the United Nations on Human Rights, Olof Palme of Sweden and African of the Year The following year, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to then U.S. president, Barack Obama. Together with V-Day, UNICEF and Panzi Foundation is building the City of Joy, a community of patients victims of sexual violence in Congo.
How Mukwege currently working in the world, in Brazil and also in Porto Alegre, tirelessly, day after day, imparting all of us as people, fighting against quixotically that is devoid of human values?
The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, Mukwege not know, but I wonder how would this hypothetical encounter. Freire certainly would talk to that Mukwege was a great utopian, since to believe strongly that the world can be better, not only transforms the lives of their patients, but all who know him. And, thus, also came to believe in my own utopias, among them that he would be known in Brazil. The cycle Frontiers of Thought proved that utopias, giving reason to Paulo Freire, is absolutely real, as real as the hopes of a child who dreams of recovering the smile in the confines of Africa.

Published by Zero Hora Newspaper (06/26/2010)  http://zerohora.clicrbs.com.br/zerohora/jsp/default.jsp?uf=1&local=1§ion=capa_online

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