Emergency Rooms
By Amjad Farid
“When we become aware of reality and reach consciousness of it, we bear responsibility for our actions—and inaction. We may choose to act or to refrain, but in either case, the responsibility remains ours.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre
The awarding of this year’s European Union Human Rights Prize to Sudan’s Emergency Rooms is a truly well-deserved recognition. At its core, it acknowledges extraordinary heroism, exceptional creativity, and a legendary, unparalleled effort that transcends the limits of the possible and leaps over the barrier of the impossible.
What these heroes have accomplished on the ground was not governed by the planning and execution frameworks adopted by global humanitarian institutions—those guided by predetermined manuals and constrained by questions of safety, feasibility, bureaucracy, and political correctness, which often reduce people to mere numbers and evaluate actions according to donor agendas. Rather, it was a necessary act, free of hesitation, directed precisely toward the point of need at its most urgent moment.
These heroes did not waste time in theoretical debates or in escaping the call to act—they plunged directly into action itself, evolving their methods through direct engagement with reality and their own ingenuity in navigating it.
Through my own proximity to these Emergency Rooms in supportive roles, which allowed me to witness their uniquely organic and brilliant operational methods, I can say without exaggeration that the experience of Sudan’s Emergency Rooms represents a turning point—one that should reshape global humanitarian systems.
These Rooms managed to fill a massive gap by bypassing, out of necessity, the rigid dependence on spreadsheets, sterile maps, ornate technical jargon, and often meaningless strategic reports and plans. Instead, they carried out their fieldwork through experimental, adaptive planning—unafraid to get their hands dirty in the soil of reality, to wade through its mud and rubble, and to confront its dangers not in avoidance, but in defiance—because those dangers are the essence of the need they were created to meet.
This is what the global humanitarian system must learn from this experience—if it does not already recall it from its own forgotten past.
The most important lesson Sudan’s Emergency Rooms offer is that local initiatives—those rooted in organic knowledge of the reality, environment, and context—are the most effective and impactful. Thanks to their flexibility, their unwavering determination, and their intimate understanding of the ground reality, these Rooms were able to overcome the epistemic shortcomings inherent in blueprint-driven humanitarian interventions.
They innovated grassroots, flexible response mechanisms that adapted to the rapidly shifting and often harsh conditions of emergencies—no matter how unexpected or severe. Moreover, they did so with a far lower cost than the conventional models designed in the offices of Geneva, Rome, or New York.
What Sudan’s Emergency Rooms have accomplished will remain unmatched—in both content and impact—within the context of what Sudan has endured and continues to endure.
They were not simply engaging in charitable work; they were waging a courageous resistance—for the right of their people to live. A resistance that embodies its heroic slogan:
“None of us are okay unless all of us are okay.”
