Dr. Amani Ballour was the manager of an underground hospital in Syria. Now her life is the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary. Dr. Amani Ballour during her visit to The New York Times. “I just wanted to study and be a doctor and have a clinic. That was my dream.” — Dr. Amani Ballour, the first and only woman to manage a hospital in rebel-held Syria Dr. Amani Ballour’s first ever patient was a 12-year-old boy who had been shot in the head. She was 24 at the time, studying medicine at Damascus University in Syria, just as protests against President Bashar al-Assad were reaching a boiling point in early 2012. The boy had been near one of the demonstrations when government forces swooped in to quash the rally, shooting at random and turning the young bystander into a victim. His parents, worried that the authorities would arrest them, decided not to take him to a hospital and instead turned to Ballour, who was their neighbor at the time. But by the time they got to her, he was dead, Ballour recalled in an interview at The Times. “I could do nothing for him.” From that moment, her life became inextricably linked with the fate of Syria, a country that for nine years would be leveled by a brutal war, leaving an estimated 500,000 men, women and children dead, as of 2018, and displacing more than five million more. “I just wanted to study and be a doctor and have a clinic. That was my dream,” Ballour said. “But lots of things changed in my life.” Almost immediately after she graduated from the university, Ballour started volunteering at a hospital in eastern Ghouta — a rebel stronghold near Damascus — as one of the few doctors in the area. The hospital, which was under construction, was intended to be a large, six-story medical hub, but the work was abandoned as government forces ramped up attacks and seized the area, forcing the team of 13 doctors to move operations into the winding, subterranean space that made up the foundation of the unfinished building. Soon enough, the new, underground clinic came to be known as the cave. In 2016, after four years on the job, Ballour was promoted to manager, making her the first and only woman in charge of a hospital in rebel-occupied Syria. Her work in that role formed the gravitational center of a new, aptly-named documentary, “The Cave,” from National Geographic Documentary Films that was nominated for an Oscar this year. As the conflict dragged on, the patients, some as young as a few days old, continued to pour in by the thousands, injured from the battles, weakened from the war, some with shrapnel wounds, others with missing limbs, and many coughing and suffocating from chemical attacks that had been repeatedly condemned by the rest of the world. Ballour, as manager, would supervise their treatments, jumping in to perform emergency surgeries herself and making house calls for patients too sick to come to her, all the while remaining composed and human. It was also on her to find ways to keep the hospital a safe haven, ordering fortifications above ground when needed and scrounging for resources. With Ghouta under siege by government forces, the hospital survived on financial aid from medical nonprofits, while supplies of medicine, food and milk for children were all cut off and had to be smuggled in, Ballour said. Every day, Ballour and her largely-female team of doctors and nurses grappled with the kinds of challenges that medical professionals in other parts of the world rarely face: What to prescribe a sick, malnourished baby when there’s no food? How do you perform a surgery without anesthetics? How do you keep a hospital running smoothly to the deafening soundtrack of bombings above ground and wailing parents below? The most difficult thing, Ballour recalled, was choosing which ones to help with the few resources they had. “All of them have the same symptoms; all of them are suffocating,” she said. “But I had to choose: I will work with this child and the other will die.” “I always think about that. I feel I am guilty.” Ballour, the second youngest of two brothers and three sisters, was always “stubborn.” Her eldest sister was married off at the age of 13, but when Ballour entered her teenage years, she insisted on finishing her education and going to college. “I wanted to do something different,” she said. “Before I started studying medicine, I wanted to be an engineer.” Her family refused to support her because in their eyes engineering was a man’s job. So she switched plans, focusing instead on becoming a pediatrician, which seemed more palatable for her family, she explained. Later in her career, despite having proved herself as both a skilled doctor and a strong leader, she nevertheless constantly bumped up against the deep-rooted limitations of being a woman in a religiously conservative society. Raoul Wallenberg Prize for her humanitarian efforts. Last weekend, she attended the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, Calif. And, today, she and her husband are applying for asylum in Canada, hoping to start afresh and move forward. But the memories of the war continue to haunt her and make it difficult for her to work with children again. “When I see sick children, they remind me of my children in Ghouta,” she said referring to all the children who came through the cave and she considered her own. “I can’t forget them.” Source
