April 2007 London meeting
Despite the hot weather this months meeting was well attended, the members listened to two excellent talks.
Our first speaker was Jessica Boyd who showed us the Zabbelan, or garbage collectors of Cairo. Originally this population of Coptic Christians, who live in an area north of Cairo’s Citadel collected rubbish to feed their pigs.
Nowadays Jessica explained that they are responsible for collecting 3000 tonnes of rubbish each day. The rubbish is brought back to their suburb by the men and the next day the women sort the rubbish so that it can be processed for recycling.
The Kings of this are the families who specialise in plastics; they even have shredders and cleaning processes and employ workers, where there’s muck there’s brass or Egyptian pounds at least. Other groups recycle paper, cloth and even shoes. The Zabbelan are doing what the western world is trying to achieve, Cairo actually has one of the best records for recycling the city’s trash in the world.
However the Zabbelan’s livelihood is being threatened by multi national companies brought in by the government on a commercial basis, one example being that the Zabbelan now have to pay to collect rubbish in some areas, while the government pays a multi national to do the job.
After the break our second speaker was Jonathan Kaplan, whose talk was entitled “A surgical sojourn in the Kurdistan Mountains”. Jonathan showed us the reality of working for an NGO in a war zone as a doctor. Just getting into Iraq meant an awkward journey via Syria and Turkey, his mission to set up a forward treatment centre.
When he eventually managed to meet up with his colleagues from the French NGO AMI, they started work using a tent as a field hospital, treating injured combatants who in some cases had been carried on their shoulders comrades for days over the mountains in order to get treatment.
Jonathan told us he soon learned that there are limitations as to what he can do in these conditions, patients died under the knife, where as in a conventional hospital with proper equipment they may have lived. He realised the injured chances of survival would be greater if he were to set up on the other side of the mountains.
Once in Iraq they set up in a fort, however getting equipment in was another headache as a gung ho US helicopter crew managed to throw out their pallets of equipment along with food aid attached to parachutes, they saw their precious equipment and drugs smash all over the mountain side. But they salvaged enough to start up and were soon treating the wounded. They also treated civilians; many children had to have toes amputated after a frost bitten trek over the mountains.
Before he set off, Jonathan had asked his surgeon father for advice, his father gave him two pieces, Fill your stomach when you can and empty your bladder when you can! Jonathan has written a couple of books about what he termed his questionable career choices, they are The Dressing Station: A Surgeon’s Chronicle of War and Medicine and Contact Wounds: A War Surgeon’s Education
By Padmassana
London meetings are held at The Church of Scotland, Crown Court, behind the Fortune Theatre in Covent Garden at 2.30pm the first Saturday of each month. There is no London meeting in August, but we will be back in September. For more information, you can contact the Globetrotters Info line on (+44) 020 8674 6229, or visit the website: www.globetrotters.co.uk