US nurse on migrant rescue ship reunited with Darfur boy she saved

At the height of Sudan’s Darfur war in 2004 — then the world’s worst conflict — an American nurse tended to a baby injured in the leg. Fifteen years later, she was miraculously reunited with him on a migrant rescue ship working in the Mediterranean.

The Ocean Viking, run by charities MSF and SOS Mediterranee, had rescued four boats of migrants off the Libyan coast between August 9 and 12. One of the 356 migrants was a 17-year-old boy named Omar whom MSF nurse Mary Jo Frawley had healed as a toddler.

“I remember this baby. His mother brought him. He was wounded in the right leg and needed medical attention when the attacks happened. Everybody had to run away to the mountains. They were difficult times,” she said.

Omar, who was two at the time, does not remember the encounter but said “my mother told me” about it. He still has a scar running down his calf.

Omar had been wounded in bombing during the deadly conflict that broke out more than 15 years ago in Sudan when ethnic African rebels took up arms against Khartoum, which they accused of marginalising the remote region.

Khartoum armed Arab pastoralists to quash the rebellion, leading to massacres. The United Nations estimates that at least 300,000 people were killed in the conflict. AFP