The girls of Kabul count the days, they have been doing it since the beginning of the summer. The last summer of free women. The Taliban are regaining control of the city and goodbye work, goodbye nail polish, goodbye laughter in public. “We talk about all this in the locker room. You think that in other times there was a nurse who improvised dance steps in there. Now she doesn’t do it anymore. It seems like a lifetime ago.” Ornella Spagnolello, 32, a Sicilian from Carlentini, has been on the medical staff of the Emergency hospital in Kabul since May and, as a woman, has one more reason to live with concern the change that, very soon, will overwhelm the whole country left without the protection of the West. “The only hope – he says – is that the city will pass to the Taliban without further bloodshed. But everything is an unknown factor. Four Italian colleagues and one South African work in my group. We also do not know exactly what we will be allowed to do. in the future”.
Their Afghan colleagues, on the other hand, are sure they know their path well. The younger ones learned this from their mothers. Shakabia, with her forty years, the Taliban regime knew him firsthand when she was a child. His family fled to Pakistan, in a refugee camp he began studying until he graduated in medicine. “Shakabia is very good – says Ornella Spagnolello – but she knows she won’t work anymore. It’s a destiny she knows she has to accept. We talked about it during a break, while we were having tea. She has two children and an unemployed husband. I asked her. if he tries to leave. He replied that he does not want to leave his country, that he does not want to return as a refugee. In addition to Shakabia, four Afghans enter the operating room with Ornella Spagnolello and are considered reliable, indeed very good. Three intubate the patients and manage them throughout the operation, the fourth prepares the tools. But they will do it for a little longer, is everyone’s prediction by now.
The news of Gino Strada’s death inevitably sowed dismay in the Emergency team even if, following the founder’s first teaching, everyone continued to do their job with the same energy as always. “We resist and fight – underlines Spagnolello – but we are in the midst of a great change. The priority, as Gino Strada taught us, remains the care of patients and I would like, we would all like to continue to treat them here, as we have always done”.
In Kabul, 46 women and 276 men operate in the three programs implemented by Emergency (the hospital, first aid posts and health care for prisoners). 29 women and 185 men work in the hospital, while 12 women and 151 men work in the non-medical staff. At the Anabah hospital, where a maternity ward has been built, the health team is made up of 174 women and 114 men, while the non-medical staff is made up of 49 women and 171 men. Finally, the Lashkargah hospital can count on 17 women and 144 men in the health staff, 13 women and 118 men in the logistics and administrative sector.
In Afghanistan only doctors and nurses can visit patients. The risk is that, by decreasing the number of female staff, women will give up on treatment. Not a novelty, rather a return to the past. “Well, I don’t even want to imagine it, it’s the thing that hurts me the most”, says Ornella Spagnolello. “Here I have seen people do their utmost to make what was objectively scary look beautiful. Like Benigni in” Life is beautiful “when he makes his son believe that the concentration camp is a playground. We have seen many women and men hoping for a better life while they wiped the blood off the floor with the rag “.
On 3 August, a few hundred meters beyond the hospital, there was an attack. “I had recently returned home and I feared that the bomb had hit Emergency itself”, says Spagnolello. “The sky turned red. For the first time I felt in the viewfinder. In an instant we were all out of our rooms.” The cloud of smoke seemed to rise right from the hospital. “I thought: they killed patients, my colleagues, my friends. Instead, the target was the house of a local politician. I ran to the hospital while we heard lots of machine gun shots. group of men to protest but we didn’t fight against whom or against what. We didn’t have time to understand it. ” Forty people affected by the explosion had already arrived. “Not all of them live”.
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