Review
One of the most enduring images of the Ethiopian famine that shocked the world in 1984 was that of the young International Red Cross nurse who, surrounded by thousands of starving people and with limited supplies, had the terrible task of choosing which children to feed, knowing that those she turned away might not last the night. That nurse was Claire Bertschinger, and those pictures inspired Live Aid, the biggest relief programme the world had ever seen. ?In her was vested the power of life and death,? Bob Geldof said. ?She had become God-like, and that is unbearable for anyone.? Michael Buerk, whose BBC documentary first showed those pictures, persuaded Claire to return to Ethiopia almost twenty years later. For all those years she had been haunted by the terrible choices she had been forced to make. But when she met them again, the survivors welcomed her back with open arms. Moving Mountains is her account: a remarkable tale of courage, commitment and compassion, the story of a resourceful woman who put her own life on hold in order to devote herself to others.
320pp, 160mm x 250mm, hardback, 2005

Extract
We made our own fun, chasing the giggling recovering kids around the shelter and dancing with them on feast days. Sometimes a friend of one of the Red Cross workers from the town would come and play a strange home-made stringed instrument that twanged monotonously. He'd make up songs about us and have the local people in gales of laughter. Whenever I asked them to translate for me, they were laughing too hard to do so. We'd sing with the children to the accompaniment of the ululating mothers. They were all fascinated when I whistled old favourites such as 'This old man, he played one' or 'Whenever I feel afraid, I whistle a happy tune'. They also loved stroking the hair on my head, arms and legs as it was so different from theirs. When I went for a pee in the pit latrine, they would play peekaboo games through the holes in the sacking that acted as a not very good screen. The angrier I got, the more fun it became for them, so I ended up trying to ignore them. They would follow me around, imitating the way I spoke and laughing at their own efforts. I often felt like the Pied Piper as dozens of children scrabbled to hold or hang on to a bit of my skirt wherever I was going. With all the children clambering all over me - snotty, shitty, bug-ridden and generally unwashed - I would get filthy but I couldn't resist cuddling them whenever I could, and I often had one perched on my hip or riding on me piggyback.

One thing that made the situation more difficult for me was the lack of other people I could talk to. Most of our local helpers didn't speak good enough English to become really close friends. After working flat out all day, they usually wanted to get home before the curfew. The one exception was our field worker, Asmara. She was my right hand. I couldn't have survived without her. We discussed everything and she advised me on how I should go about setting up projects in a way that would fit in with local customs. If a doctor at the local hospital refused to admit a child, Asmara would calm me down, whispering that this was just the way he could show his power, and that there were more subtle ways of getting round him and getting treatment for our children. An Ethiopian man would never lose face by giving way to anger, so I had to be patient. 'Claire, in Switzerland you have watches,' she'd say, 'but here in Africa, we have time.' I learned that things got done in their own time. The only solution was to adapt to African time, be patient and wait. It usually worked and eventually the doctor would come round. Asmara taught me so much. She was my ears and eyes for what was going on and a barometer for the moods of the people. She was incredibly quick to learn and worked hard.

Soon after I met her, Asmara took me back to her house to meet her family, who were somehow related to the Ethiopian royal family. As we walked through the streets, she took my hand and I remember feeling very awkward at first, although it seemed to be what everyone there did. We walked and sang together and I made myself kick off my Western inhibitions and enjoy the moment. She took me to a wooden shack with a corrugated iron roof and windows without glass. We entered the only room, where I met Asmara's mother. I knew that she looked after Asmara's baby daughter while she was at work. There was a strong smell of eucalyptus wood smoke, incense and cow dung from the cow tethered outside. The room wasn't very big and Asmara, her baby and I sat on the one bed that they all shared, while her mother squatted by the open wood fire preparing coffee. It was an intricate traditional ritual that took over an hour. First she fried green coffee beans in an open pan, and then she brought the pan over to waft the aromatic smoke in our faces while we inhaled deeply. After roasting them for a little longer, she ground the beans with a wooden pestle and mortar, boiled them and sieved them through a piece of material. Then she carefully served the coffee in tiny china cups without handles. Tradition and politeness demanded that I drank three cups. It was bitter and tasted nothing like the coffee I was used to at home. Asmara's fourteen-year-old brother and fifteen-year-old sister stood by, giggling. Her mother generously offered me a glass of milk straight from their cow. I hesitated, thinking about tuberculosis and brucellosis, but I couldn't refuse. We ate injera that was cooked over the fire in a large blackened terracotta plate while the lentils and animal entrails bubbled in a saucepan alongside. We went out to the back of the shack where chickens scratched in the dust around the cow and I saw that the family possessed the luxury of a pit latrine. They seemed very poor to me, but with Asmara's wages from the centre they had a lot more than many of their neighbours.


Our global society has hardly changed at all in terms of understanding the effects of our own greed and anger on the world. It is not just the politicians who are responsible for this. Every one of us should take responsibility for it too. Daisaku Ikeda, the international leader of the Buddhist movement, once wrote, 'A great revolution of character in just a single man will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation and further, will enable a change in the destiny of all Mankind.'

Power to change the world and stop wars and human suffering, then, lies with ordinary people like you and me. If we care about changing the world, we must also look at changing our own lives: challenging our greed and anger and nurturing our wisdom and compassion; using our desire to change the world as a reason to challenge ourselves; getting rid of isolationism and becoming global citizens; viewing each encounter in our daily life as an opportunity to make things better for others.

Chaos theorists say that the flapping of a butterfly's wings can cause a tornado in another remote part of the world. We are the butterflies. By thinking globally, yet acting locally, each of us can and will make a difference. We all have the power to move mountains and change the world.

Click here to read an article by Pierre Pradervand about this title.

Editor's note: Claire Bertschinger is Pierre Pradervand's niece.

From Moving Mountains, ?2005 by Claire Bertschinger, published by Transworld Publishers.