Never give up on anyone.

Abstract

In 2007, I was chairing the Annual Meetings Committee of the Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS), and with persistence we had arranged for the ever popular Governor General Michelle Jean as our keynote speaker. Due to personal health issues, she was forced to cancel her engagement in February, so we scrambled to find a replacement. Fortuitously I stumbled on a TV interview with Ishmael Beah, whose memoir ‘A long way gone’ had just been published. This book chronicles his 3 years as a boy soldier in the civil war in Sierra Leone in the early 1990s, having survived a massacre in his village when he was 13 in which his parents and several siblings were murdered. Prior to this, he had enjoyed a bucolic and stable life in which he enjoyed memorizing Shakespeare. The massacre brutally and instantly ended his childhood, as he fled into the jungle with a brother and friends. They were however captured and pressed into fighting for the government army, which began a hellish new phase of his life involving unrelenting killing of innocent civilians fueled by a constant supply of drugs. In his words, “The more violence you committed the more you showed your loyalty to the group”. During the TV interview I observed an articulate young man with a sense of humor who had survived a brutalizing experience with his humanity intact. At 16, he and other boy soldiers in his group were rescued by UNICEF and taken to a recovery center in Freetown where he was slowly rehabilitated over many months. He credits one nurse in particular—Nurse Esther—with refusing to give up on him despite his unrelenting anger and aggressive outbursts. Music played an important role in his recovery, and at one point she gave him a Walkman and a tape of favorite hip hop songs that gave him renewed hope. And so we obtained Ishmael as our keynote speaker. Prior to his talk a dozen of us met him in a congenial reception, and I recall that as we laughed and chatted I gazed at his hands and thought “Imagine what those hands have done”. He then delivered his 45 minute keynote address which held us all in rapt attention. He made only veiled reference to the brutality he had experienced, sparing us the grim details. He concluded by saying “I want to leave you with one final message—“Never give up on anyone’. If Nurse Esther had given up on me I wouldn’t be here”. My eyes still mist as I recall those powerful words. His message resonated powerfully with all of us in the audience who have all been tempted to give up on a difficult patient or family. The mystery is what creates the resilience that allowed him to survive and emerge down the road as a loving husband and father of three children. ‘Never give up on anyone’ is a powerful and life altering mantra.