When they finally found him, he had lost everything, his home, his job and his possessions. But all he wanted back were his patients.
A Kosovar doctor, kicked out along with his patients from the Pristina state hospital because they are ethnic Albanian, was scouring an Albanian refugee camp looking for his most seriously ill patients.
For Ruth A. Barron and Jennifer Leaning '67, two Harvard medical school faculty members in the area with Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), it was a sad but familiar human story of a conflict most Americans just watch on CNN.
"In the middle of the conversation [the Kosovar doctor] took out of his jacket a makeshift little wallet," Leaning says. "He had a picture of one of his patients... he also had two photographs of microscope slides... documenting the extent of the infection in the central nervous system."
"He said, 'You might think it's odd that I have these pictures of her, but it's very important that we try to find her," adds Leaning, assistant professor of medicine and a longtime board member of PHR.
Barron and Leaning say that his story was not uncommon among the displaced doctors in the camps. No matter how much they had lost, their first concern was for their patients.
Barron and Leaning have been to Kosovo and the surrounding area several times in the past year with PHR, an organization formed in 1986 to investigate and prevent human rights violations.
Though NATO attacks would not begin for another four months, in order to get into Yugoslavia they had to apply for tourist visas--everyone who had applied for visas as humanitarian workers had been denied.
In November, they traveled to Kosovo to document the experiences of ethnic Albanian doctors as the Serbian crackdown in Kosovo increased in intensity.
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