Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
It's a good thing I didn't know exactly how dangerous a trip I was embarking on, because
when I left home in October 2013 to fly to Sudan, I was scared enough. What I had committed
to was, quite frankly, the most "impossible" thing I'd ever tried to accomplish.
Three months earlier, over dinner, I'd learned about a doctor in Sudan's Nuba mountains,
Dr. Tom Catena, who was treating thousands of people -- many of them children -- who'd
had limbs blown off in the Sudanese government's bombing raids. By coincidence, we'd just posted
an article to our website about Richard Van As, an amazing inventor who created a low-cost,
3-D printed prosthetic hand. So, over a second beer, I raised the possibility -- wouldn't
it be cool if we brought printers over to Sudan and made arms for these kids?
The story might have ended there -- one of those plans you cook up over dinner and forget
by breakfast. Really, what can one person do in the face of such widespread sorrow thousands
of miles away? But when I got home and looked up Dr. Catena,
I read about one of the patients he'd treated: Daniel -- a 12-year-old boy who, in attempting
to protect himself from an aerial attack, wrapped his arms around a tree. The tree protected
his body, but both his arms were blown off by the bomb that exploded those few meters
away. The amputation and hospital treatment had
saved his life, but when Daniel woke and realized what had happened he said he wished he would
have died. It was one of the most heart-wrenching stories I'd ever read.
It was 11pm. I looked down the hallway to where my three boys were sleeping and thought,
"What if it were my kid?" What if this happened to them and somebody out there could help
them -- and didn't? In that moment, I realized I couldn't just
close the computer, get a glass of water and go to bed. I had to do something.
Going to Sudan try to help thousands of people was way too daunting. There was no way I could
get my head around that. I couldn't help the many. But I could help
one. I could help Daniel.