Ammar Waraich and me

Naturally, I turn to my stuff first. There’s something weird about going over what you’ve written, because it’s only then you realise just how shit it is. But what struck me even more strongly was just how shit the rest of it was. I mean, the comments section is burgeoning with, you know, comment. And that’s great. I’m all for people giving their opinion. It’s just that it’s all pretty much bollocks. Check out last week – page one includes two tits discussing whether we’d rather pay thirty thousand pounds this year, or in five years’ time. Then there’s me, a self-obsessed cretin with a beret and a copy of A Very Short Introduction To Sounding Like A Philosophical Tit. You’ve got Master-of-the-Overextended-Analogy Mr. Amit throwing another (admittedly loveable) literary curveball at you, and Samuel Black – Captain Pseudonym who would probably marry his pen name if he loved it any more, although that would merely force him to change his name to it, thus negating the entire point of it.

And Noel Forrest! Mr. Forrest of Felix 1393 – the doors rotate slower than the Earth? Slower than the Earth, which rotates at more than nine hundred miles an hour, Mister Forrest the scientist? What kind of fucking irony is that, exactly?

Truthfully, I enjoy the comment section. I think of us as the Felix equivalent of Have I Got News For You – a few disgruntled regulars who try to be quick-witted where they can, and take the piss out of the guest writers where they can’t. But if this is your favourite section of Felix, then you’re wasting your fucking time. All of you, in fact, are wasting your time. Except Ammar Waraich.

That name probably doesn’t ring a bell, because you don’t look at a writer’s name all that often, and if you did read the articles I’m about to talk about then the writer’s name was probably the last thing you were interested in. However, if you don’t regularly read as far back through Felix as the Travel Section, then I implore you to hunt down the last few weeks of back copies and take it all in, because the most gripping journalism of Felix’s year may have just passed you by.

Hang on, the hyperbole machine’s just stalled. While I try and restart it, just go and have a look at one of the past weeks. Mr. Waraich is a medical student, who took it upon himself last summer to do a placement for a month out in rural Kenya. Far from being full of white people in khaki chasing leopards with cameras and suchlike, it turns out that rural Kenya is actually in pretty bad shape. Not the kind of bad shape that you see on the news – there’s nothing immediately awful going down out there, not some horrible disaster occurring that BBC News 24 hasn’t managed to pipe into your eyeballs. It’s just sitting there. Festering, almost.

If you can choke down my Schadenfreude, I’ll elaborate a little – his exploits in Kenya take him quite far afield. Off the beaten track lies, amongst other things, death, suffering, knife-edge survival, lack of resources, more death, more suffering, and yes, it’s Africa, we’ve all seen Live Aid, right? We don’t need to see another trip around that big place with the trees.

The thing is – as with all student journalism – there’s something different about seeing someone who isn’t intentionally trying to publicise something, being put up against the reality of the thing in question. That’s why Emily Wilson’s critique of art in London is so frequently hilarious, and it’s why Ammar’s experience of being a doctor in Africa is so absolutely fresh and cutting. He tells you that he was angry with people for not following what he saw to be common sense – only to find that it was poverty and exploitation that had forced them into such situations. He tells quite harrowing stories about how he failed to save lives by a matter of minutes.

We all know people who’ve been on gap years and whatnot, and probably read their pisspoor attempts at chronicling it, but even the furthest journeyman did little other than lay some bricks on a floor or talk very loudly in English at bemused children. Ammar’s account is powerful, honest to a fault, and illustrated by some of the finest images I’ve seen. I can’t criticise it. I can’t be cynical or harsh. It’s just great journalism, and it puts whining shits such as myself to shame.

This is what being a student is about – seeing the world with eyes that aren’t jaded by experience and bias, seeing it first-hand and relating it to others. It makes me thoroughly proud to be a writer, and simultaneously ashamed of my incapability to match his frankness. As we sail on into Valentine’s Day like an elephant on a Hornby train at the edge of a rather pink minefield, clutching closer to our loved ones and cursing our inability to spend a banker’s wage on a diamond the size of our genitalia, I’m not asking but demanding that you go and hunt his writing down. It defines, for me at least, what it means to be young and free in this world. Something that, by reading his words, you may come to cherish even more.

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