Story of Shrapnel

Ali Najem, son of the head of surgery at Najem hospital in Tyre and an aspiring doctor, shows Kevin Sites some of the shrapnel that is being pulled from victims in southern Lebanon.

Play this Video

 

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT 

KEVIN SITES: [We're looking at] a whole box full of things pulled out during operations from different people. What we're looking at right now looks like part of a circuit board that may have been in one of the explosives used in the Israeli air strikes.

There are all kinds of things in this box: hunks of metal, parts of circuit boards. There's wire in here. Pull that wire out. Let's just take a look at that. These things, from the power of the blast being lodged into the human body, just seem kind of amazing. You can see — this is foreign matter — once it gets inside the body, the kinds of infections this can cause just from the dirt alone. It means the patients have to be pumped full of antibiotics, something that's starting to become in short supply here at the hospital.

Ali, this is all from just the first day, right?

ALI NAJEM: Yes.

KEVIN SITES: When you see this, I mean, you would like to be a doctor some day. What does this make you think as somebody that is a future medical professional?

ALI NAJEM: I'd like to be a doctor in the future. I'd like to work in reconstructive surgery when I see all this shrapnel doing horrible things to the people. They come in here and we should amputate their legs, their arms. So I think in the future if I want to help my citizens, I should study reconstructive surgery.

KEVIN SITES: It seems there will be a need for this now, as well as in the future.

ALI NAJEM: I'm thinking of plastic reconstructive surgery because the beautiful Lebanese, they want also plastic surgery. The southerners here want reconstructive surgery.

KEVIN SITES: The ladies in Beirut want to look beautiful, the people here just want to look normal.

ALI NAJEM: Yeah, the ladies in Beirut are far from the accidents that are occurring here in southern Lebanon. Also, between the Lebanese people there are many conflicts.

KEVIN SITES: There are lots of divisions between the different sects.

ALI NAJEM: Those in northern Lebanon, on the mountain, they don't see what's happening in southern Lebanon. Some of them are just saying, 'Why is all of that happening? Why does [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah do that? This is all about southern people. The southern people brought all these problems to us.' We are not involved in that. We are just paying the bills of these wars and they are just doing plastic surgeries.

KEVIN SITES: Paying the price of it.

ALI NAJEM: That's what we are paying.

Email Story IM Story

RECOMMEND THIS STORY

Recommend It:

Not at All Somewhat Moderately Highly Very Highly

Average (Not Rated)

ALSO ON YAHOO!