(II) afghanistan

The NYTimes features a portrait of Alberto Cairo, an Italian physiotherapist who has run the Red Cross’ orthopedic rehabilitation center in Kabul since 1990. The Center has provided protheses to nearly 90.000 people who have mainly been disabled due to injuries sustained from the decades of warfare, which have also left behind some 10 milion mines. “Mr. Cairo, slim, affable and an energetic enthusiast of tennis, rarely shows the edginess that wears away at the most courtly of foreigners under stress in foreign lands. But a rare impatience shows when the people who know what he has accomplished suggest that he has become a legend here. Rather, Mr. Cairo says it is he, more than his Afghan patients, who has been the greatest beneficiary of his years in Kabul,” reports the Times.