“One person at a time” (Feltrinelli) by Gino Strada read by Tullio Fazzolari
To understand a little more the best qualities of a person, sometimes apparently secondary details or episodes are helpful. Gino Strada, surgeon and founder of Emergency, was an atheist but had long collaborated with Catholic voluntary organizations. And in this there was no contradiction but maximum consistency with one’s values. It was the way to help others and Strada didn’t hold back. And this is what he has done all his life by operating the wounded and treating the sick almost in every part of the world from Afghanistan to Sudan, from Peru to Iraq.
Unfortunately, Gino Strada is gone. The usual bad bad was taken away in August 2021. “One person at a time” (Feltrinelli, 176 pages, 16 euros) comes out posthumously and in the intentions of the author it is not intended to be an autobiography but the story in the first person of a unique experience through what he has seen and understood. But it is not easy to distinguish because in every page the commitment and humanity of Strada, his ideals and his way of behaving always emerge. If it is not a memoir, at least it is the chronicle of an existence lived as a mission and not as a simple profession.
When Emergency was born in 1994, Gino Strada was already an established surgeon. The boy who came from the working-class district of Sesto San Giovanni has a brilliant degree in medicine, has refined his surgical technique in Houston and Cape Town, has a permanent job at the polyclinic and would have no difficulty in finding work in any hospital or clinic. But career and earnings are not his calling. He has already chosen to be a surgeon for the International Red Cross and has gone to operate in areas at risk: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Ethiopia. Treating the sick no one cares about is what they care about. Emergency is the tool to do it where others do not intervene.
Perhaps this was his true mission Strada had begun to think as a child hearing the story of what had happened in Sesto San Giovanni in 1944: instead of targeting the Breda factory, a bombing had hit the houses and an elementary school, killing more than 600 people including 184 children. He has certainly dedicated his life to remedying the horrors of war. The experiences he describes in “One Person at a Time” are in fact a condemnation of all wars but also the defense of a fundamental right of every person: that of the sick person to be treated. And from Strada’s story it is clear that there is still a lot to do on this. It is almost convenient to think that this is a problem in Kabul or Sierra Leone. In reality, as Gino Strada denounces, even in Italy it is not at all good if in a year four million people give up on treatment due to economic difficulties. Rich or poor, the patient must be operated on, the patient must be treated: one person at a time. But without ever excluding anyone.
