Claire Bertschinger
Claire Bertschinger did not set out to become an author. "I always wanted to be a nurse" she says, and it was that profession that led her into a way of life that she could not possibly have previously imagined: she became a Red Cross aid worker in Africa, and is credited with inspiring Bob Geldof in his Band Aid and Live Aid fundraising ventures...
Aged just 20, Bertschinger found herself at an aid post in Ethiopia at the height of its 1984 famine, surrounded by 85,000 starving people, with the daily task of deciding which children would be allowed into the feeding station and which were too sick to be saved. "I felt like I was sending these children to the death camps" she recalls. While there, she was filmed by Michael Burke's news crew and was subsequently seen on TV by Bob Geldof. "In her was vested the power of life and death," said Geldof at the time, "She had become God-like and that is unbearable for anyone."
Unaware of the press coverage, she carried on her work in the feeding centre and was oblivious to the fact that she was the catalyst for so much fundraising. In fact the events of 1984 and 1985 left Claire so traumatised that for two decades she was unable to speak to anyone about what she had seen. The writing and publication of her autobiography, Moving Mountains has therefore, been a cathartic experience.
On the show, Claire talks about her life, her vocation, and what writing Moving Mountains has meant to her. The book is based on her letters and diaries, written whilst she was working in some of the poorest, most war-torn and famine-ridden places on the planet - Uganda, Afghanistan, Sudan and Lebanon, among many others - and was, she says, her way of dealing with those experiences. While she was working, she found herself so caught up in the day-to-day horrors that she stopped talking about them, but her new direction - teaching other nurses at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who will find themselves in similar situations what to expect and how to deal with them - and writing the book have allowed her to share what she saw and felt. "It changed my life, writing that book", she confides; "I told the world exactly what war is like". In writing it, she also found a faith that she never expected to, and takes pains to emphasise the importance of thinking of others: "I witnessed the impact of charity first-hand" she says, "but if we care about the planet we're living in, why don't we care about humanity? We need to think globally, and act globally."
Moving Mountains is priced £7.99, as is available from all good bookshops now.
