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Visit to Iraq eye-opening experience

Jun- 1-2004 » Filed Under: Iraq News

Susan sent us this article from her local paper. Great photo included.

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By TERESA HICKS, Times-News

JOHNSON CITY - The world is not the same place it was a month ago. Not for Dr. Martin Olsen, at least. Olsen, chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at East Tennessee State University, recently returned from a visit to Iraq, where he met with doctors in the northern Iraqi Kurdistan area.

He went there expecting to teach the Iraqi doctors how to reduce maternal mortality rates, but he wound up learning a lot more than he taught.

"I thought I was going over there to help with maternal mortality," he said. "It turns out, they're intelligent physicians, and they had already done everything I was going to tell them to do."

Olsen's visit was part of an ongoing relationship established between ETSU and a group of Kurdish physicians by a U.S. State Department program. [...]

Despite the Kurds' frustrations, Olsen said most of them admire Americans and are thankful for the presence of U.S. troops in southern and central Iraq.

"They call it the war of liberation," he said. "They credit America for saving their lives. When we got across the Turkish border, the first Iraqi we met was the border guard who said, ‘You're Americans - you are welcome here.' And he sat us down and served us tea," Olsen said.

"And when we went to the medical center in Halabja, everybody was standing outside waiting for us - who knows how long they'd been standing outside? And everybody had learned one word: ‘welcome.' And the little girls gave us flowers."

Olsen said that during the entire three weeks he spent in Iraq, he only encountered one person who expressed anti-American sentiments.

"And she was British," he said.


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