Author(s): Maithri Goonetilleke

General

Vula Bevalile: Letters from a Young Doctor is a collection of vignettes written over seven years by Australian doctor Maithri Goonetilleke, who has been contributing his time voluntarily in Swaziland-a country devastated by extreme poverty and the HIV and AIDS epidemic. Through the stories, the reader is taken on an incredible journey across a landscape of extreme adversity and medical and economic hardship. But it is the final, overwhelming sense of humanity that is most striking and empowering. The ultimate outcome for the reader is a profound understanding of a people with enormous resilience, pride, humility, and courage. This book calls on us to think again, to ask ourselves what we are doing in our own lives and why. Reading it, we are compelled to review what it is that propels us forward and to reflect on our own values, aspirations, and expectations, on what we ourselves are spending our lives struggling for. - Paul A. Komesaroff (Professor of Medicine and Director, Centre for Ethics in Medicine and Society, Monash University, and Executive Director of Global Reconciliation, Australia)