“The situation in Afghanistan is bad. I have news of friends and former colleagues who are there and who are like brothers and sisters to me. Every day there is someone who mourns a dead person. Every day there is a count of those who have died , of those who are still alive and of those who do not answer the phone. But the hospital holds “. To tell time.news it is Cecilia Strada, the daughter of Gino Strada, the founder of Emergency who passed away on August 13, commenting on the news coming from Kabul.
“I left Emergency in 2018 and as an organization I cannot speak”, concludes Strada, however, he remembers, “for years with Emergency I have told what happened in Afghanistan. For years, years and years there have been full hospitals, there was no more space but Afghanistan was not in the newspapers and did not move. Now it is fine to be moved – he points out – but we had to think about it first. The lesson we should learn is to move when there is still time to save people, without waiting for the situation has degenerated “.
“I – Cecilia Strada said – I do not want to moralize anyone but the attacks by the Taliban and the bombings of the coalition that was leveling houses and hospitals with patients inside were there even before”. For years, Strada points out, Afghanistan has been “completely ignored”. “People preferred either to ignore it because it is a distant country – he observes – or to tell the beautiful tale of a peaceful Afghanistan, which, however, was not. A dead child is a dead child. It is now as it was three years ago”.
“What we may have to ask ourselves – he concludes – is whether we can try to be more attentive to what happens in the world when we still have time to change things”.