The Red Cross nurse who inspired Sir Bob Geldof’s Live Aid, Claire Bertschinger has fought to save lives under fire in many of the world’s most desperate trouble spots including Lebanon, Afghanistan, Sudan, Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as Ethiopia. In 1991 Claire was awarded the prestigious Florence Nightingale Medal for her outstanding work. She now lives in the UK and teaches at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

In 1985, while Claire was a young nurse working in Ethiopa, she was featured in Michael Buerk’s BBC’s report on the region, which led to the biggest relief effort the world had ever seen. One of the most enduring images of the BBC’s coverage of Ethiopia’s famine was of Claire surrounded by 85,000 starving people, having the terrible task of choosing which children to allow into the feeding centre, and which were too far gone to be saved. “In her was vested the power of life and death” commented Sir Bob Geldof at the time, “she had become God-like, and that is unbearable for anyone.”

The horror of the appalling choices she was forced to make haunted her for twenty years. In 2004 she returned to Ethiopa with Michael Buerk and the BBC for a follow-up documentary Ethiopia – A Journey with Michael Buerk. Claire has written about her experience in Moving Mountains, written in conjunction with Fanny Blake and published by Transworld in 2005.

"Behind every war, every refugee camp, every famine are the invisible working people no one sees. Not the journalists, who get all the attention, but the nurses, the doctors, the logisticians necessary to try to end the agony of masses of people who were simply born in the wrong place and the wrong time. It was Claire Bertschinger, a nurse for the ICRC, who brought the world's attention to the starvation in Ethiopia, to the men, women and children who were dying in droves at her feeding centre in Mekele. If not for her, there would be no BBC cameras, no Live Aid, no Bob Geldof, and no outpouring of compassion and comraderie that restored one's faith in humanity, if only for a few minutes. Bertschinger's courage is matched only by her conviction; her tireless effort to comfort the hungry and dying is a beautiful story that needed to be told, and more importantly, needs to be read."
Janine di Giovanni