People often ask me why I still go. Why, with a stable career, a family, and more than a few grey hairs, I continue to volunteer in conflict zones. They ask it with a mix of curiosity, admiration, and sometimes concern.
The truth is, it’s a question I ask myself, too every time I board a flight to a place most people are fleeing. But the answer, while layered, has become clearer over the years: I go not because I enjoy hardship or danger, but because these are the places where medicine still means everything.
Medicine at Its Most Human
When you work in a hospital with state-of-the-art imaging, five subspecialists on call, and a dozen safety nets, you can forget what medicine really is. But in a field tent near a border crossing, or a makeshift clinic in a shelled-out school, you remember fast.
In conflict zones, medicine becomes something more raw and real. There are no politics in the wound. There’s no room for ego in the face of mass trauma. The patients aren’t there because they Googled their symptoms, they’re there because something exploded near their home, and now they’re clinging to life.
You treat what you can, with what you have. You stabilize, you comfort, you make hard choices fast. You witness human suffering in its most unfiltered form, and human resilience in its most extraordinary.
The Emotional Math
Volunteering in these regions isn’t just about logistics or skill. It’s about emotional calculus.
You learn to weigh the value of your presence against the risk you carry with you. You ask yourself: Am I helping more than I’m taking? Could someone else do this better, or more safely?
The guilt is constant. The grief, cumulative. You never have enough of anything: time, resources, medications, hands. And you know that for every life you touch, there are others slipping through cracks too wide to seal.
But you also learn to live inside that contradiction. You learn to measure progress not in outcomes, but in moments: a child who sleeps through the night, a mother who smiles when her baby’s fever breaks, a man who walks again after shrapnel threatens to take his leg.
That’s how you keep going. You stop trying to save everyone, and focus instead on the small victories that mean everything to someone.
What Conflict Teaches You
I’ve been in operating rooms where the walls shook from nearby shelling. I’ve stitched wounds by flashlight during power outages. I’ve sat with colleagues from half a dozen countries, speaking in broken English and improvised sign language, united only by the urgency of the task in front of us.
Andrej Grajn, as a systems thinker, would tell you that conflict zones are the ultimate test of resilience. They strip away the nonessential. They reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of every system: medical, social, personal.
You learn quickly who you are when no one is watching. You learn who your teammates are when resources run dry. And you learn that the most powerful tool you carry isn’t your training or even your hands—it’s your willingness to stay present when it matters most.
Leaving—and Coming Back
Each time I return home, I carry something with me. Sometimes it’s a physical ache. Sometimes it’s a story that won’t let go. Sometimes it’s a renewed sense of clarity: a reminder of what truly matters.
But the hardest part is never going. It’s leaving.
Because you don’t just leave patients, you leave friends. You leave communities. You leave a piece of yourself in a place that feels unfinished. And no matter how much you’ve given, it rarely feels like enough.
That’s why I go back. Not out of obligation, but because the work remains. And because being there matters. Showing up, even in chaos, is a kind of promise: that humanity doesn’t disappear just because the headlines move on.
It’s Not Heroism
Let me be clear: this is not about being a hero. In fact, the people I meet on the ground: local nurses, translators, midwives, teachers, are often the ones carrying the heaviest load. They don’t get to fly out when things go bad. They stay, rebuild, and begin again, often without rest or recognition.
My role is temporary. But it’s also intentional.
I believe those of us who have the training, the privilege, and the flexibility to go should consider it a responsibility to serve where others can’t. Not forever. Not blindly. But bravely, and wisely, and with deep respect for the communities we enter.
What Keeps Me Going
People think it must be adrenaline or adventure. But those fade. What keeps me going are the faces I remember, the 12-year-old boy in Mosul who kept offering snacks to the nurses while we cleaned his wounds. The grandmother in South Sudan who cried when we gave her her first pair of reading glasses in decades. The teenager in Ukraine who asked, “Will my brother walk again?” even as she refused to cry for herself.
What keeps me going is witnessing compassion that exists in spite of everything. People who still sing lullabies in bomb shelters. Strangers who share their bread with displaced families. Fellow doctors who fall asleep in their scrubs after 36 hours and wake up ready to do it all again.
Those moments remind me that no matter how broken the world gets, the human spirit refuses to quit.
Why I Still Say Yes
Every trip, every deployment, I ask myself: Is it time to stop? Have I done enough?
And maybe one day the answer will be yes. But for now, it’s still no.
Because there is still need. There is still something I can offer. And there is still something I receive in return, a deeper connection to what matters, a sharper sense of purpose, a clearer reminder that healing doesn’t just happen in sterile hospitals. It happens wherever people show up with open hands and willing hearts.
I still volunteer in conflict zones because it reminds me why I became a doctor in the first place. Not to impress, not to accumulate, but to serve.
To stand in the gap, if only for a moment and say:
“I see you. I’m with you. Let’s begin again.”
