Moving Mountains

Twenty years ago, Michael Buerk's reports on the famine in Ethlopia shocked the West into action and resulted in the biggest relief programme the world had ever seen, supported by Bob Geldof and Live Aid. One of the most memorable images of that time was of the young British nurse working for the International Red Cross, who, surrounded by 85,000 starving people, had the terrible task of choosing which children to help out of all those who were too far gone to be saved. They called her 'Mamma Claire'. 'In her was vested the power of life and death,' Bob Geldof has said, 'She had become God-like, and that is unbearable for anyone.' Earlier this year Michael Buerk persuaded Claire Bertschinger to return to Ethiopia for the first time to confront her feelings of guilt, and the result was a moving documentary shown in January 04. When she joined the International Red Cross, Claire Bertschinger was fulfilling a passionate vocation for relief work in dangerous places. Apart from Ethiopia, she has worked with war wounded and hostages in Labanon, with the Mudjahadeen in Afghanistan, and with prisoners and victims of crossfire in Uganda, Sierra Leone and the Sudan.
Often working in war zones under fire herself, she has shown an impressive combination of courage, commitment, compassion and resourcefulness. Her story is of a warm, charismatic woman who chose to save lives rather than settle down and start her own family - and in the process found a great personal happiness.