Albert Cairo: Scraps of Men do not Exist
Alberto Cairo is the head of the ICRC’s orthopaedic programme in Afghanistan. He’s spent the past two decades in this war-ravaged nation far from his native Italy helping more than 100,000 Afghan landmine & accident victims learn to find the strength within themselves to not only walk, but also to hope, again. He shares with us his wish for overcoming the social and physical barriers the disabled face in war-torn communities across the globe.
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ABOUT Alberto Cairo
” With physical disabilities on the rise in Afghanistan, there is one man who has committed his life to rebuild, limb by limb, the innocent victims of the continual Afghanistan conflict. Doctor Alberto Cairo is known as the ‘angel of Kabul’. He has run the International Committee of the Red Cross Orthopedic Centre in Kabul for many years.
After more than twenty years of conflict, the maze of land mines and shells has had a devastating impact on the people and country side of Afghanistan. Per capita, the land of Afghanistan has more land mines than any other country in the world.
More than ten million mines are hidden in Afghanistan’s fields, orchards, along its roads and in abandoned houses and courtyards. Infants, teenagers, and adults have been wounded by weapons that keep firing long after a conflict is over. More innocent people have fallen victim to the debilitating effects of the land mines that were intended to maim and kill soldiers.
They include: farmers plowing fields, young men chasing wandering cattle, women gathering firewood, children playing in the open fields, and displaced families returning to their abandoned homes and farms only to discover them booby trapped all continue to be casualties of a war that none of them asked for.
Alberto Cairo is one of the most beloved foreigners in all of Afghanistan. He makes and fits new limbs for hundreds of amputees each month. According to the Red Cross, it is the world’s biggest project of its kind. He was born in Italy and practised law for 44 years in Italy before deciding to pursue a different cause of defense.
As a trained physiotherapist, Dr. Cairo has created a prosthesis factory in Kabul. Using cheap, local materials like rubber from recycled Russian army tires and glass shards from blown-out windows, he equips the Afghani people with legs, arms and hands.
His Centre has survived six Afghan regimes, civil war, the Taliban, and recent U.S. bombings. Directed and run by Dr. Alberto Cairo, the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kabul is the only rehabilitation Centre in Afghanistan. “People need legs, corsets, splints, whatever,” says Dr. Cairo, “but they need also, above all, to be put back into society with a role.”
Dr. Cairo has introduced what he calls ‘positive discrimination’ where nearly all of his three hundred member staff are war amputees. In addition, special seminars are held to train disabled victims on how to become useful, productive contributors to their towns and villages in spite of their handicaps.”
The VIDEO
