The Good Doctor
I recently watched Sedika Mojadidi’s new documentary “Motherland Afghanistan.” The broadcast premiere is scheduled for Tuesday, February 13, 2007 on PBS. Here’s the brief synopsis of the film as presented by the New York Times:
In a country where once in seven women dies during childbirth, a filmmaker whose compassionate father works in women’s medicine strives to provide optimism and hope to patients who endure their debilitating illnesses with remarkable courage. Sedika Mojadidi’s father once worked in Kabul’s Laura Bush Maternity Ward - where scare medical supplies, outdated equipment, and even clogged toilets rendered virtually impossible the proper care of his patents. When Mojadidi travels to a modest, but newly erected hospital in the Ghazni region to follow his father’s career, however, she soon discovers that despite the lack of an experienced medical staff and a desperate need for training, women are willing to travel for days to receive treatment in what has come to be known as a nurturing and caring environment.
What better way to portray a country in transition than to focus on the fate of its newborn babies?
And what could be more effective in drawing attention to that ravishing, ravaged country called Afghanistan than to have a doctor tell you why mothers and children were dying—and what was being done, against all odds, to save them?
“Motherland Afghanistan” is a powerful and moving documentary.
The onscreen presence of Dr Qudrat Mojadidi, the film-maker’s father, is a gift. Again and again, in a voice that mixes bluntness with compassion, the doctor diagnoses what is wrong not only with his patients but also the world that we live in.
A wonderful feature of this film is the grace that people display even amid suffering. It is a bit like the natural beauty of Afghanistan that you glimpse when the camera travels between places, showing, beyond poor or often ruined houses, stunning images of the land and the mountains and blue sky. Grace and fortitude. That is what Sedika Mojadidi has found among the ordinary people in a country whose tribulations at the hands of the superpowers make for a sordid, epic saga.
I must confess that I was often less restrained than the people I saw in the film. Dr Qudrat Mojadidi is in a hospital in Afghanistan, bent over his pregnant patient, complaining that the suture keeps breaking. He needs good sutures, he needs proper medical supplies. A woman and her child are about to die. And the unholy thought that enters my mind is about bombs. I know this is crude thinking but the film forces me to ask: how many rolls of good, unbreakable suture could have been bought for one of the countless bombs dropped on that land?
