E.R. For The War-Torn

By Jeff Chu/London

Gino Strada is bracing for a busy winter in Afghanistan's Panjshir Valley. The Italian surgeon runs Emergency, which operates the only fully equipped hospital in the region dominated by the Northern Alliance. As part of his group's aid work, the Milan native, 53, recently brought the first electric lights to the village of Anaba. But now he is preparing for war, trying to keep the facility's 70 beds clear for the wounded, who have already begun showing up at Emergency's six first-aid posts on the front line.

Strada's staff knows what to expect. Although it includes a handful of foreign medics, most of the more than 200 support staff are themselves previous patients, victims of the country's chronic warfare. The nonpartisan Emergency had been operating a hospital in Kabul as well, but shut it down in May after a raid by the Taliban religious police, in which both foreign and Afghan staff members were beaten up. The reason: men and women were not properly segregated in the dining hall.

Emergency is the outgrowth of one man's crusade against the kind of misery he first confronted while serving in Kabul with the Red Cross in 1991. Looking for a typical patient profile in the clinic admissions log, he discovered that it was not a young male combatant wounded in Afghanistan's civil war. Instead, typical meant civilian and female. Three years later--relying mostly on private donors in Italy, including the pro soccer team Inter Milan--Strada had rounded up enough financial support to launch Emergency. Since then, the group has treated nearly 200,000 women and children as well as some combatants at its clinics and rehabilitation programs in Afghanistan, Cambodia, northern Iraq and Sierra Leone.

It is wrenching, dangerous work. When Emergency took over the main hospital in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, in 1994, Strada's team worked without running water, electricity or even a roof. "It helped when we had a full moon," recalls Strada. The conditions will only get worse in Afghanistan, where he would rather not be. "Emergency's ultimate goal," he says, "is to be completely useless." Sadly, that's not likely anytime soon.

--By Jeff Chu/London