The first Taiwanese doctor to join Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said yesterday that he was inspired to join the international medical and humanitarian aid organization after visiting an MSF photo exhibition when he was still a medical student.
Sung Jui-hsiang (宋睿祥), a surgeon at Keelung Chang Kung Memorial Hospital, shared his experience working for the organization at a “Forgotten Wars” news conference sponsored by the hospital.
He said when he was in his fourth year in Taipei Medical University, he visited an MSF photo exhibition and was transfixed by the picture of a tiny, emaciated Afghan child with desperate eyes that stayed with him for a “long, long time.”
“I wanted to be a different doctor,” Sung decided then, saying the picture had changed him and opened up his horizons.
During his time as an intern, he applied to join the organization through its Hong Kong office and went to Liberia to perform his first tour of humanitarian service the following year.
The 34-year-old doctor said his decision then was met with opposition from his family.
He was grateful for his father’s support, but his girlfriend left him.
Last August, Sung went to Yemen to perform surgery amid the country’s civil war.
The hospital was set up in the middle of a combat area, Sung said. At night, artillery fire would flash through the sky, similar to firecrackers lighting the sky on Lunar New Year.
“It would be a lie if I said I was not afraid,” he said.
He spent three months in Yemen and performed more than 1,000 surgeries. Faced with the dead and injured every day, he realized how vulnerable people are.
Living is something to be cherished, he said, and “happiness is not something to be taken for granted.”
Sung said people who pursue medicine should have love and passion, and he urged more local doctors to join the organization and spread more love from Taiwan.
A total lunar eclipse coinciding with the Lantern Festival on March 3 would be Taiwan’s most notable celestial event this year, the Taipei Astronomical Museum said, urging skywatchers not to miss it. There would be four eclipses worldwide this year — two solar eclipses and two lunar eclipses — the museum’s Web site says. Taiwan would be able to observe one of the lunar eclipses in its entirety on March 3. The eclipse would be visible as the moon rises at 5:50pm, already partly shaded by the Earth’s shadow, the museum said. It would peak at about 7:30pm, when the moon would
Taiwan’s Li Yu-hsiang performs in the men’s singles figure skating short program at the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, on Tuesday. Li finished 24th with a score of 72.41 to advance to Saturday’s free skate portion of the event. He is the first Taiwanese to qualify for the free skate of men’s singles figure skating at the Olympics since David Liu in 1992.
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) yesterday held a ceremony marking the delivery of its 11th Anping-class offshore patrol vessel Lanyu (蘭嶼艦), saying it would boost Taiwan’s ability to respond to Beijing’s “gray zone” tactics. Ocean Affairs Council Deputy Minister Chang Chung-Lung (張忠龍) presided over the CGA event in the Port of Kaoshiung. Representatives of the National Security Council also attended the event. Designed for long-range and protracted patrol operations at sea, the Lanyu is a 65.4m-long and 14.8m-wide ship with a top speed of 44 knots (81.5kph) and a cruising range of 2,000 nautical miles (3704km). The vessel is equipped with a
Two siblings in their 70s were injured yesterday when they opened a parcel and it exploded, police in Yilan said, adding the brother and sister were both in stable condition. The two siblings, surnamed Hung (洪), had received the parcel two days earlier but did not open it until yesterday, the first day of the Lunar New Year holiday in Taiwan, police said. Chen Chin-cheng (陳金城), head of the Yilan County Government Police Bureau, said the package bore no postmark or names and was labeled only with the siblings’ address. Citing the findings of a
RSS