Barbara Brookes
How do people heal the scars of persecution? This question arose for us when visiting Dachau, where a relative spent about a month in late 1938. Unlike many others, he was fortunate in being released, promising to leave Germany. In fact he had been trying to get his family out for some time, but being over 40 made it difficult to get entry anywhere (New Zealand had turned him down earlier in 1938). Acceptance came—for about 800 Jewish refugees—from the Dominican Republic, where the dictator, Trujillo, accepted immigrants while at the same time treating Haitians ruthlessly. Trujillo’s dictatorship is brilliantly depicted by the Peruvian novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, in The Feast of the Goat. [Read more…] about Healing the scars of persecution
Last week we went to church, Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in New Orleans, to be precise. While we were there we witnessed, and took part in, some transformative singing. The experience was something like 
When I started my career shift from Hospital Medicine to Palliative Medicine in 2004, my mother asked me “Why in the world do you want to work with people who are going to die? That is so depressing.” My answer then and my answer now is the same. “I am a doctor, I already work with people who are dying—and I know it can be done better.”
I knew he had died. Before reading the letters, I knew the end of his story. Sergeant Charles Leonard (Len) Hooper from Masterton, serving with the New Zealand Machine Gun Battalion on the Western Front, died in November 1918 in France just four days before the Armistice. His letters to his English fiancée, Elizabeth Sibthorp of Hornchurch – his ‘dearest Lizzie’ – are bundled in a grey folder loosely laced with thin white tape, held in the Imperial War Museum archive in London.