JULY 23

Biography

Photo Credit: Matteo Masolini

Gino Strada was born in Sesto San Giovanni, near Milan, on 21st April 1948.

He graduated in Medicine and Surgery from the State University of Milan and specialised in Emergency Surgery.

In the eighties, he completed his education as a medical surgeon by spending four years in the United States, where he worked on heart and heart-lung transplant surgery at Stanford and Pittsburgh Universities. He then moved to England and South Africa, where he respectively trained at the Harefield Hospital and the Groote Schuur Hospital (Cape Town).

In 1988, he decided to devote his experience in emergency surgery to the care of war wounded. In the following years, up to 1994, he worked with the Geneva International Red Cross in Pakistan, Ethiopia, Thailand, Afghanistan, Peru, Djibouti, Somalia and Bosnia.

“What we and others do for them, what we can do with our strength, is perhaps less than a droplet in the ocean. But I still think there better be that droplet, because it would be worse for everyone without it. That is all. It is a hard job, being a war surgeon. But for me it is also a great honour.”

Letter from a war surgeon, taken from Strada’s book “Pappagalli verdi” (Green Parrots)

The birth of EMERGENCY

In 1994, the experience gained over the years with the Red Cross prompted Gino Strada, together with his wife Teresa Sarti and some colleagues and friends, to found EMERGENCY, an independent and neutral association set up to provide free high quality medical and surgical treatment to the victims of wars, landmines and poverty.

The first project of EMERGENCY, which saw Gino Strada in the frontline, took place in Rwanda during the genocide. He then went to Cambodia, where he stayed for several years.

In 1998, he left for Afghanistan, making his way to the north of the country by land; it was there that, a year later, EMERGENCY started its first Afghan project, a Surgical Centre for war victims in Anabah, in the Panjshir Valley.

Gino Strada spent about 7 years in Afghanistan, treating thousands of war and landmine victims and contributing to the development of further projects in the country.

At present, EMERGENCY operates in Afghanistan with 3 hospitals, a Maternity Centre and a network of 44 First Aid Posts.

In 2005, Strada began working on the opening of the first totally free heart surgery centre in Africa, the Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery in Sudan.  In 2014, he travelled to Sierra Leone -where EMERGENCY has been present since 2001- in order to deal with the Ebola emergency.

EMERGENCY has treated over 11 million people so far. The spending of funds and the distribution of expenses in the projects have always been publicly available in the EMERGENCY Annual Balance Sheet and in the Sustainability Report.