Just after six I walk home from the station through the rain. Perhaps the rain will wash away the heard misery. In the morning I saw people without papers at office hours in the big city. Stories of West African men, wandering through Europe for years, depressed and despondent by their misguided choice for more happiness and security, stuck between their past and their future. I see the ever-recurring, ever-weeping old man from South Asia, whose entire family has been shot. One week I’m trying to control his diabetes, the next week his asthma. How to proceed is unclear, unshakably stuck.
The intern sitting next to me is from Africa and fled Ukraine two weeks ago. She had a few more months before she would get her doctor’s degree. I hope her life is only on hiatus and she can become the gynecologist she wants to be.
In the afternoon I am the doctor for a few hundred Ukrainians. Thirty years ago bombs were made on this site. Now there are bunk beds in a dark hall, children are playing, people are glued to their screens. I have to sift between what needs to be done now and what can wait. Thanks to a fantastic Ukrainian interpreter, I can survive. She deciphers names in passports or scraps of identity papers, helps to find the names on medicine boxes. She reassures and exhorts to calm down.
Most complaints are not complicated, the stories are. A baby born too small on the first day of the war, which I saw before the weekend, is not there for control. The very young mother moved on with her and her other sick children the next day. I see men arrested in the Caucasus years ago for criticizing the government. They fled to Ukraine, became addicted in an attempt to assuage their traumas and are once again adrift. They are seriously ill. I patch them up and ask my ‘boss’ to arrange addiction help.
Old women with high blood pressure, young men with diabetes, everyone has stomach aches from the misery. In a normal general practice someone sometimes makes a joke, not now. Doing nothing makes you depressed. ‘Our people want to work,’ says my interpreter. “Then they, like me, forget the horrors at home.” But you can’t work without a social security number, and you can’t get it in a temporary location. Finally, I see a young woman who has been severely depressed for years. Alone on the road, vulnerable prey for people with bad intentions. I break out in a cold sweat when she tells me she’s going to live with someone soon. I don’t have to worry, my interpreter assures me, if I share my fear of human trafficking. I so want to believe it.
This is what the consequences of geopolitical entanglements and deception look like: washed away dreams, ruined lives, serious damage to health, lasting threat. For decades to come, in millions of people.
Putin understanders and go-to-your-own-country callers from the House of Representatives are allowed to come with me for a day. Each refugee then gets a face.
Joost Zaat is a general practitioner