An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-first Century**

'I know what genocide looks like'

She had been raped. Semen and blood covered her thighs. Her ears had been cut off. So had her breasts. Both Achilles tendons had been severed. Her attackers had carefully mutilated her, not to kill her quickly, but just enough to make her die slowly.

He noticed a pattern one of her attackers had carved into her face with a machete. “I turned from her and vomited for the first and only time during the genocide,” he writes. She touched his arm again. “ Ummera-sha,” she murmured. “ Allez, allez … Ummera-sha,” she repeated in a whisper. “Go, go. Courage, courage, my friend,” she was saying. She knew there were hundreds more who needed care. “It was the clearest voice I have ever heard,” Dr. Orbinski says.

"An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-first Century"
by James Orbinski, M.D. Past President of MSF.