Letters from the Land of Fear ― Intimacy, Beauty and Death in Central Asia

For 11 months Calvin White worked for Doctors Without Borders as a mental health specialist in the off-the-radar region of Karakalpakstan in western Uzbekistan. Unlike the higher profile emergency situations which draw that international humanitarian organization's attention, the milieu for White's mission was the quiet, slow death in an epidemic of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. As White's forward says: "This is a small story about small people written by a small person so maybe there is no interest in it. On the other hand, since most of us on the planet are also small, maybe there is." White takes the reader inside the daily heartbeat of humans we've never heard of but come to see as sharing the same pulse. It is a remarkable journey of intimacy and hope, one that reconfigures our understanding of sadness and, ultimately, reaffirms the common spirit of humanity.

A former high school teacher and counsellor in small town British Columbia, Calvin White translated his experience developing educational and therapeutic approaches for troubled teenagers into leading a team of local counsellors in Uzbekistan, a remote corner of central Asia. As a mental health specialist for Medecins Sans Frontieres, he spent a year creating therapeutic practises aimed at saving the lives of hundreds of patients suffering from multi-drug resistant tuberculosis.