Let’s begin with a quote: “There are moments in which silence is guilty and speaking is a duty, a civil obligation, a moral imperative”, from “The rage and the pride” by Oriana Fallaci. Yes, it’s true.

 

Rage. When you see six children with leukemia in a room, lying in a bed, hopeless, and you know that those children have no chance to be cured and survive, rage is the only possible emotion.

 

And if you think that those children, if only they could get the necessary treatment, almost certainly could be saved, then the rage becomes a profound sadness. And to treat that child you just need a fraction of the money you need in a western country. So you can’t stop, you must go on and on, pushed by the pride of being a human being.

 

What can I talk about? About the four transplants done here at the cost of one in Italy? About the satisfaction of taking care of the transplant process from the beginning to the end, using all the almost forgotten medical knowledge about drugs because most of the antibiotics and anti-virals are not available here? About the extreme kindness and collaboration with Pakistani professionals? About the perfect internet infrastructure set up at the PIMS and SHIFA hospitals?

 

These are important and exciting things, for sure. But now we can’t stop, you must and can do more there. And you can do it with little. And I’m looking forward to do it. And I’m waiting with the certainty that soon those four transplants will be forty, that instead of two sterile rooms we’ll have ten of those, that we’ll have a genetics lab. That we’ll have and have and have. Because it’s no time to stop now.