Sunday 15 May 2011
- Article history
When Dr Karen Woo went to Afghanistan it was not only to take her medical expertise to where it was most needed, but also to capture some of the country and its people on film, to show their desperate need for healthcare.
Her video footage shows children in Kabul suffering from the afflictions of war – the lost limbs, disease and malnutrition – and explains in detail why she felt drawn to face the risks of working in a conflict zone.
When the 36-year-old from Stevenage, Hertfordshire, was murdered, in August last year, in a remote area of the country, her fiance Mark "Paddy" Smith saw some of her film for the first time and decided to finish her work. For the past nine months, he has worked on an extraordinary project – a film that Woo began and that he has now completed, with a far different ending than she would have envisaged, but one that, he says, would have won her approval.
The Life and Loss of Karen Woo, to be shown on ITV next Sunday, is a moving documentary of two lives caught up in the complexity of Afghanistan.
"Karen's principal reason for being in Afghanistan was to help people by using her medical skills. But she also really wanted to make a film to show the human side to Afghanistan, that people here were human beings and we all have our fears and worries," said Smith. "Health is the leveller, everyone knows what it's like to be sick. And when you can't just run down the local hospital… it's tough.
"Although Karen never expected it would get any kind of national, wider audience, Karen was one of those people who believed in fate and that things come into your life for a reason. It might not have been the documentary that she would have made, of course, but to try to finish her work, using her footage, was very important and gave me something to throw myself into," he said.
Woo was on her way home after having joined a gruelling two-week aid expedition when she was killed. She had been part of a team taking medicines deep into Nuristan, a remote and impoverished region in the far north east. The 10-strong expedition, including six Americans, a German and two Afghan medical-aid workers, was ambushed by men claiming to be Taliban fighters. In cold blood, they were shot one by one. There was one survivor, an Afghan driver, left to tell the story.
For Smith, one of the hardest things to hear from the traumatised driver who survived the attack was how, 20 minutes before the Taliban ambush, his fiancee had been dancing around the vehicle, singing with excitement that she was soon on her way home to be married.
"She was so excited that in two weeks she would be Mrs Woo-Smith, she was so happy," he said. At 36, she had found what she had so long worried she would never find – the perfect partner – and was due to fly home to the UK for their wedding in London as soon as the team got back to Kabul.
"I was left with such an inordinate sense of loss, of the most perfect person for you, that person that everyone hopes to meet, the person that you want to be with, have children with," said Smith. "The completion of Karen's work was just something that was there to be done, it was the primary reason for her being there in the first place."
Smith, 36, a former Royal Engineer, met Woo in Kabul where he works as a security consultant. The couple set up home together after a whirlwind romance. Watching Woo's video, including the film from the trek, was a difficult experience, as was hearing her talk about the risks that she faced.
"I knew most of it. We had sat and discussed it at length," he said. "The trek we discussed at length but, to be honest, it was really not a security issues we were worried about. That area that they were going to – there was no one there, not any bad guys. The worst that we were planning for were things like a vehicle roll-over, or someone breaking a leg in such a remote area. Our contingency plans were all about getting a helicopter in, in case there was a medical emergency.
"The trek was going to focus with those real issues of getting healthcare out to the remotest areas, and it was a chance for her to see somewhere that very, very few people actually get to see.
"If I hadn't gone back home for a friend's funeral, I would have gone on the trek as well. As it was, I flew back to Kabul on the Wednesday, and she was killed on the Thursday.
"Yes, I wish I had been there. You want to protect the person you love, but could I really have done anything to stop what happened? My understanding of the speed and efficiency at which it all happened, I doubt it."
No one is really sure why the medical team was murdered. The Taliban took responsibility and claimed that the medical-aid trek was actually planned to convert local people to Christianity – something that was patently untrue . But the Nuristan Taliban shadow government distanced itself from the crime, saying that those killed were friends of Afghanistan. "And they were," said Smith, who still lives in Kabul.
"My analogy with Afghanistan is that's it's like receiving a poke in the chest every day. Every day it doesn't hurt, but after a while you've got an almighty bruise. They killed Karen, but I know that the Afghan in the street didn't have anything to do with it.
"I'm not after revenge or retribution. I don't know if I'll ever find out why it happened. None of it means Karen is coming back."
The month before she died, Woo wrote in her blog about the death of two friends in the country: "All of these people come to Afghanistan of their own volition, they come knowing that they may pay with their lives… no one ever expects it to be them, perhaps not their immediate friends either, it is always some poor unknown person, a local national, a third-country national."
www.karenwoofoundation.com
The Life and Loss of Karen Woo will be screened on ITV on Sunday 22 May
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