Orbinski: Courage, Commitment and Choices

One of two to receive Honorary Doctor of Laws at Trent University's June 1st convocation, Dr. James Orbinski, told the graduating class not to discard "the idealism that sparks dreams of a better tomorrow for all."

"Humanitarianism must be the starting point, not an afterthought, and this is true most especially for our leaders. And whether you like it or not, or believe it or not, you are the leaders of today. Less than 0.2 percent of the world's people have a university degree, and fewer still have a degree of the quality you now hold."

A Trent alumnus, Orbinski graduated in 1984 with a B.Sc. in psychology, and began international health work while still a medical student at McMaster University. Dr. James Neufeld of Trent's English department said the intervening years since Orbinski's graduation from Trent "have been filled with hardship and service to humanity - and with more adventure than most of us experience in our lifetimes."

Orbinski has headed missions for Médecins Sans Frontiéres - Doctors Without Borders (msf), an international organization of doctors who deal with humanitarian emergencies in more than 80 countries around the world. He was in Kigali, Rwanda during the 1994 genocide and in Goma, Zaire during that country's refugee crisis. Orbinski became president of msf Canada in 1998 and in 1999 the organization was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

He told the convocation assembly about horrendous acts of atrocity whose victims found the courage to help others and to speak out even in their own agony. "You can find courage in the most unlikely places," he said describing an 86-year-old Somalia woman, ill with pneumonia, who made her way to his clinic. She had not come for herself, but to get medicine for her three-year-old nephew, the last surviving member of her family. "Her face - old, dehydrated, emaciated - was and is to me today, the face of clarity, of compassion, of dignity, and of courage."

For many, silence has long been confused with neutrality, and has been presented as a necessary condition for humanitarian action msf was created in opposition to this assumption," Orbinski told the graduating class. "The only crime equal to willful inhumanity is the crime of 'indifference, silence and forgetting.' This is its own kind of inhumanity."

He encouraged students to examine the choices they will make saying that whatever work they do is not just about "efficiencies and technical perfection" but about justice.

"You who are now degreed citizens - you will make choices about justice everyday. Will you seek out and address real need? Will you reveal injustice? Will you provoke change? Will you locate and insist on political responsibility? How hard will you fight? Who will you speak for?

" In your own work, and in your responsibility as citizens, you have a choice and if you are open to this choice you will find courage in the most unlikely places."

In paying tribute to him Dr. Neufeld said, "As his life testifies, James Orbinski has felt compassionately for the victims of injustice in our society, has embodied his compassion in action, and has reflected deeply on the ethical consequences of that action for himself and for others. He has used the opportunities presented by his recent celebrity to argue forcefully, in print and in person, for the absolute need to separate humanitarian aid from the political agenda of nations. He has never evaded his responsibility."