NYT: At a Libyan Hospital, Pride and a War’s True Cost Are Seen

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At a Libyan Hospital, Pride and a War’s True Cost Are Seen


At Ajdabiya Hospital, doctors and medical technicians tended to Hassan Adam Mohammed.
Photo by Ed Ou for The New York Times


By ANTHONY SHADID
Published: March 9, 2011


AJDABIYA, Libya — A short walk from the morgue, men gathered at noon Wednesday before a billboard that read “Free Libya” and listed the dead and wounded in the fighting that had raged for days a couple of hours away along the Mediterranean. No. 15 was Mahmoud Abdel-Hamid, from Benghazi. No. 43 was Ibrahim el-Sharif, from Ajdabiya.

...


At Ajdabiya Hospital, a low-slung affair trimmed in cream and salmon, the guns have fallen silent, save for an occasional volley in the distance. Left to reckon with the aftermath are doctors who have volunteered from abroad, nurses who have traveled here from the rest of opposition-held Libya and what remains of the hospital’s staff, thrust into the middle of a protest that became an uprising and an uprising that has become a war.

The conflict here feels anarchic, even bewildering, like a prisoner liberated from a cell and squinting into the sun. In the chaos, where men in mismatched uniforms amble around town with rifles, and pickups careen through streets with machine guns mounted in back, the hospital offers another narrative: the commitment to see a country through this trial.

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“It’s crazy, crazy,” Dr. Omar Ali said as he watched. “The inhumanity.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/world/africa/10hospital.html?adxnnl=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1299765784-rOlUUG81vzltEYo9V82paw