AFRICA: Sometimes it is possible to make a difference, writes Declan Walsh. He tells how he and empathetic Irish Times readers intervened to help Caroline Mumba.
Reporters in Africa have more contact with extreme human misery than perhaps anywhere else in the world. Tents full of starving children, wards packed with TB patients, entire towns dying from AIDS - these terrible sights are often our stock in trade.
Apart from the obvious stresses, the act of seeing also carries a dilemma.
We travel with bundles of US dollars. In a village of suffering people - think of the current drought afflicting Southern Africa - a tiny fraction of that money could make a critical difference to one person, or an entire family.
It goes beyond just the money. Is helping one person fair when thousands of others are suffering? Isn't choosing the needy the job of aid agencies? And what about getting on with the harried business of collecting interviews, rushing to the computer, sending the story? The easiest solution is to convince oneself that our job is to bring the suffering to the attention of the world. It's what they call "professionalism". Sometimes, though, it is hard to believe in.
And sometimes, it is impossible to look the other way.
Just over a year ago I was in Zambia, to write about Africa's giant debt burden. The story brought me to Masisi compound, a stinking, malaria-infested slum on the edge of Lusaka. There I came across Caroline Mumba, a 16-year-old schoolgirl waiting to have her leg cut off.
We learned that a road accident broke Caroline's leg in several places; treatment at Lusaka's Dickensian public hospital made it infinitely worse. The doctors, having run out of options, had sent Caroline home, to a small, dirty shed about the size - and cleanliness - of a coal shed.
The wound had become a glistening mass of infected flesh, punctured with metal pins the doctors had failed to remove. Her mother cleaned the wound with Jik, a product normally used to scrub toilet bowls. Amputation seemed inevitable.
As a journalist, I saw that Caroline's plight illustrated an often intangible issue - how the debt burden was crippling public health services. But as a person, I was confronted with tragedy - a girl was about to lose her leg and maybe die, for the sake of a few hundred pounds.
Many readers of The Irish Times saw it the same way. Within days phone calls, emails and money were flooding in. A teacher from Limerick said he was "extremely moved". A woman from Dublin sent £500 and offered to raise more through the Quakers. A director of a publicly-quoted company sent £2,000.
Some offers were incredible. A man with an expensive Dublin address rang me at home in Nairobi. He wanted to fly Caroline to London to have her leg operated on, and was ready to raise £20,000 among friends. I told him that wouldn't be necessary; still he sent stg£1,000.
Like many other readers, he inquired about administration costs, something that might give pause for thought to charities.
The story was also reported by a BBC colleague, Mike Donkin, and was carried in the London Independent. Soon there was over £18,000. Before leaving Lusaka we had checked Caroline into a private hospital, and put down a deposit. Now the doctors could get to work.
Last month I returned to Lusaka to find a transformed young woman. Caroline was healthy, confident and could walk - with a limp. The wound had healed and her leg, although still misshapen, was being eased into action with twice-weekly physiotherapy. She had returned to school, and chatted away in much-improved English and even a little French. With the help of a local priest the family had left the coal-shed shack and moved into a new house. It was no palace - three cramped rooms of breezeblock walls and tin roof pinned down with stones - but by local standards, it was luxury. Readers' money also paid for food and small necessities - a bed and mattress, a mosquito net, clean clothes, soap.
According to Father Leo Venhuizen, a Catholic priest who helped organise her recovery, "without help, she probably would have died". Caroline is keenly aware of her debt to those anonymous foreigners, 8,000 km away. She said: "Thank you for what you have done. I appreciate it because I was not thinking I would be walking again."
Now our problem is the opposite - there is too much money. The bill for the operation, aftercare and basic upkeep has come to just over £4,000. In keeping with readers' intentions, the remainder will go towards other emergencies, especially among children.
A few cases are already in the pipeline, such as a young boy who needs a heart by-pass in nearby South Africa. But the dispiriting thing is that there are so many.
A few shacks away, a young couple is dying of AIDS. Mwandu Chama is 28 yet cannot even lift his withered frame out of a chair. His wife Lwando (26) is also skeletal. Her hair is falling out; her body is covered in rashes. "They will not last long," says their carer.
Money also matters to these people. That day Mwanda and Lwando were supposed to visit a hospital but lacked the $4 return taxi fare. There are people like these all over Masisi, and Africa. Last year Irish Times readers empathised with the pain of one faraway girl and helped transform her life. This time, I could only hand the couple the taxi money, make my excuses, and leave.