Nursing in Beirut

The writer has asked to be anonymous:
I was a young teenager when the war began in Lebanon. Then my father died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage, caused in part by the tension he was under. I couldn't understand why people had to suffer. I wanted to find a deeper purpose to suffering. In a way, it was my search for this that kept me going.

Between 1981 and 1984 I studied nursing at St Joseph's University in Beirut. In the mornings, at the university, I learned how to take care of people in peacetime. In the afternoons and at weekends, I worked in a hospital close to the border between East and West Beirut. The war was at its height and the hospital was constantly coming under fire.

Every time the shelling began we had to take all the patients to the ground floor, lining their beds up along a dark corridor. On top of this, the wounded kept arriving in ambulances. Nearly all were young men under 30. Often their condition was so serious that they had lost consciousness during the trip. When they woke they would find that we had had to amputate one - or both of their legs.

These men went through times of terrible rebellion. They would scream insults and abuse, without knowing exactly at whom to direct them. They didn't want to hear our words of superficial comfort. Communication was impossible. Faced by their distress, we had to choose - we could either retreat into rigid indifference or allow ourselves, and our own attitudes, to be questioned.

We were under constant pressure, short of time and short of staff. Many of the nurses couldn't get to the hospital because of the shelling. What I had learned at university wasn't enough. Looking after the bodies was the easiest part of our job, but treating the inner wounds was another matter.

We nurses and doctors were tempted to hide behind our knowledge and skills. We felt superior to our patients; we felt important, because we were the professionals and we could act. But, I realized, this hurt our patients even more. Their crisis helped me to be honest with myself, to realize that I too was vulnerable. I felt poor, ignorant and miserable.

And so I learned, faced by their suffering, to say nothing; to be a silent reassuring presence which did not judge. I learned to hear the shouts and curses and not to react; to allow the patient to express what he felt. I tried to put myself in his place, to share his suffering, remembering how I had felt when my father died. I said to myself, 'I am the pupil and the patient the teacher.'

During those years I could not afford the luxury of thinking about my own problems, but I knew I must face them one day. Since then I have worked as a paediatric nurse and in an operating theatre, and I have taken time off work to think. I have begun to understand that the real threat to humanity does not come from outside, but from inside. We fight because of past injustices and so, in defending justice, we become unjust. This process could go on forever unless someone breaks it.

And so, after a painful inner struggle, I realized that I could only become free if I could learn to forgive both those who had hurt my people and my country and those who had hurt me personally. It was like choosing to let a part of myself die.

Because I had survived those years in the hospital with the amputees, I had felt I could do anything. Now, to my distress, I found I could not forgive - unless God helped me. So it was not fear that made me turn to God, nor a longing for security, but a desire for inner freedom. I discovered that he loved me. And I found that I could forgive others -and also myself.