THE
THINGS I'VE SEEN: DAMIEN BROWN
Edited version published: Frankie #26 (Nov/Dec 2008)
While Angola is one of Africa’s richest sources of petroleum
and diamonds, its people are said to be amongst the continent's poorest.
Its drawn-out 27 year civil war decimated the country, leaving behind
a dark legacy: a slew of civilian casualties and un-detonated land mines.
By the time Melbourne doctor Damien Brown arrived in 2006 with aid organisation
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the civil war had been over
for four years, but the effects were still palpable.
“We came in on a light chartered plane,” Damien says. “There’s
no road access because of all the landmines.” While he wasn’t
exactly expecting a shiny metropolis, Damien was still taken aback by
the town itself, which was in Angola’s south-east corner. “It
was just a collection of mud huts. There were probably about 10 brick
structures in a town of 20,000 people. Half of them were MSF buildings;
the other half were bombed out during the war.”
Once there, Damien was basically the only doctor for a few hundred kilometres.
It wasn’t like Australian medical work, either. “At a hospital
back home, you have a patient in a bed,” Damien explains. “In
Angola, it’s a family affair. If there’s one patient, there’ll
also be three brothers and sisters, and Mum and Dad staying there. There’s
people in the bed, people sleeping under the bed, next to the beds. The
smell was overwhelming. Medically, you deal with anything. There was no
option to send patients to other bigger hospitals, because there was no
road access.”
During Damien’s stay, Angolan de-miners would deactivate uncovered
land mines using controlled blasts, every couple of days or so. These
were done in the evening, and they’d always radio the MSF team to
give them fair warning. However, one day, Damien and other MSF crew were
having lunch, when they heard an incredibly loud explosion, which definitely
wasn’t controlled or planned.
“It was visceral,” Damien says. “You could feel it.
Windows shook.” Immediately the radio went berserk, with de-miners
telling MSF staff that it wasn’t one of their de-activations; that
there must have been an accident in town. Damien and a nurse grabbed an
emergency medical kit and went running down the street.
“We got 50 metres down the road, and a wall of people came running
towards us with the injured slung over their shoulders. Within 5 minutes,
there were dozens of injured all over the floor, screaming families.”
Angolans limped around, nursing shrapnel wounds that had struck their
limbs and heads. Another kid had his jaw blown right off, and upon realising
there was nothing he could do, Damien book an emergency plane.
It was only later that Damien discovered what had happened. After the
war, people started re-building huts and markets again, almost ad-lib.
“So there’s an entire cache of landmines under the town, and
no one knows where they are,” he says. “They cook inside the
huts in winter. Someone had made a fire, and there was a mine—enough
to blow up a tank—sitting under their hut. The heat of the fire
was enough to trigger it, and it blew the hut sky-high. A lot of people
in the market nearby were hit with shrapnel.
“It was so overwhelmingly sad and humbling,” he says. “Here
were people who’d dealt with 27 years of civil war. There were food
shortages; having to walk kilometres for fresh water; kids dying from
all these preventable illnesses. On top of that, something as simple as
a little house fire leads to this utter carnage. It really highlighted
the bullshit these guys have to live with—even so many years down
the track. The resilience of these people. They don’t hold out their
hand and beg for help. They get on with life.”
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