A training lifeline for rescuers
When Mike VanRooyen was doing relief work in war-torn Somalia in the early 1990s, he realized he had found his life’s work. He also realized he didn’t know what he was doing. VanRooyen, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, described Tuesday how a 6-year-old orphan named Fatima helped him to understand the harsh conditions and stark, life-or-death choices being made by refugees every day — and also showed him how much he still had to learn. VanRooyen is part of a generation of disaster responders who learned on the job, relying on the advice of co-workers, on their own wits, and on hard-won experience to apply medical and other skills to the unique environment that exists in a war zone, after a devastating earthquake, amid a hurricane’s floodwaters, and in other relief settings. VanRooyen, Harvard School of Public...