World Humanitarian Day: It is a duty to try to help those in need

Imagine the courage, the life-defining optimism, it takes for a nurse who has led a safe, sheltered life in, say, one of Ireland’s bigger towns, to take their very first step into a crowded, sweaty ebola clinic in one to the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s cities, Beni or Butembo Goma, say, where 1,808 of 2,765 confirmed victims have died in the current outbreak which started last August.

Imagine the focus, imagine the grace, a doctor whose only experience of violence might have been a two-minute stampede to get a seat on a no-frills airline needs to continue working in the all-but-forgotten Syrian battleground around Idlib, where most operating theatres have been moved underground to try to survive air-raid bombing. In recent days, seven members of one family were killed there in an escalation of a Russian-backed offensive.