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Claire Bertschinger
Dame Claire Bertschinger, DBE, DL (born 1953) is an Anglo-Swiss nurse and advocate on behalf of suffering people in the developing world. Her work in Ethiopia in 1984 inspired Band Aid and subsequently Live Aid, the biggest relief programme ever mounted. Bertschinger received the Florence Nightingale Medal in 1991 for her work in nursing, and was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 2010 for "services to Nursing and to International Humanitarian Aid".
The daughter of a Swiss father and British mother, Bertschinger was brought up in Sheering near Bishop's Stortford, Essex.
Due to dyslexia, she could barely read or write until she was 14. After her parents got a television in the 1960s, one of the first films she watched was The Inn of the Sixth Happiness starring Ingrid Bergman playing the role of Gladys Aylward, an English missionary to China in the 1930s who is caught up in the Japanese invasion. Bertschinger thought: "I could do that. That's what I want to do." She graduated from Brunel University with an MSc degree in Medical Anthropology in 1997.
Bertschinger is a Buddhist, practising Nichiren Buddhism. She became a member of the global Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai International in 1994.
Her autobiographical book, Moving Mountains, was published in 2005. The book describes her global experiences and her spiritual motivation that led her to Buddhism. Part of the royalties from the book go to The African Children's Educational Trust, a British charity.
After training and working as a nurse in the UK, Bertschinger became a medic on Operation Drake, an expedition with Colonel John Blashford-Snell and the Scientific Exploration Society in Panama, Papua New Guinea and Sulawesi.
After this experience, she joined the emergency disaster relief group of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), allowed to attend war locations thanks to her dual-nationality. Through this she has worked in over a dozen zones of conflict including Afghanistan, Kenya, Lebanon, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Liberia. She also worked at ICRC headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland as training officer in the Health Division.
Bertschinger is an ambassador and Trustee for The African Children's Educational Trust, Patron for Promise Nepal, and a voluntary worker for the charity Age UK.
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Claire Bertschinger
Dame Claire Bertschinger, DBE, DL (born 1953) is an Anglo-Swiss nurse and advocate on behalf of suffering people in the developing world. Her work in Ethiopia in 1984 inspired Band Aid and subsequently Live Aid, the biggest relief programme ever mounted. Bertschinger received the Florence Nightingale Medal in 1991 for her work in nursing, and was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 2010 for "services to Nursing and to International Humanitarian Aid".
The daughter of a Swiss father and British mother, Bertschinger was brought up in Sheering near Bishop's Stortford, Essex.
Due to dyslexia, she could barely read or write until she was 14. After her parents got a television in the 1960s, one of the first films she watched was The Inn of the Sixth Happiness starring Ingrid Bergman playing the role of Gladys Aylward, an English missionary to China in the 1930s who is caught up in the Japanese invasion. Bertschinger thought: "I could do that. That's what I want to do." She graduated from Brunel University with an MSc degree in Medical Anthropology in 1997.
Bertschinger is a Buddhist, practising Nichiren Buddhism. She became a member of the global Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai International in 1994.
Her autobiographical book, Moving Mountains, was published in 2005. The book describes her global experiences and her spiritual motivation that led her to Buddhism. Part of the royalties from the book go to The African Children's Educational Trust, a British charity.
After training and working as a nurse in the UK, Bertschinger became a medic on Operation Drake, an expedition with Colonel John Blashford-Snell and the Scientific Exploration Society in Panama, Papua New Guinea and Sulawesi.
After this experience, she joined the emergency disaster relief group of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), allowed to attend war locations thanks to her dual-nationality. Through this she has worked in over a dozen zones of conflict including Afghanistan, Kenya, Lebanon, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Liberia. She also worked at ICRC headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland as training officer in the Health Division.
Bertschinger is an ambassador and Trustee for The African Children's Educational Trust, Patron for Promise Nepal, and a voluntary worker for the charity Age UK.