As I've mentioned before, I've been trying to find websites that post a more positive view on world events. When you search for good news, there is plenty of great and positive news out there that mainstream media rarely picks up.
Aside - Whilst searching for a suitable image to insert here, I searched for "I have some good news" and accidently clicked on "News" instead of "Images". The top result was "Ukraine risks losing initiative at war's critical stage - and time may not be on Zelenskyy's side" which might well be good news for Vladimir Putin but few outside Russia would agree.
The 3rd result was better - "Reading FC have some embargoes lifted but major concerns remain" and this is perhaps a post for another time. Back to the topic of today's post...
I've started visiting positive.news which semi-regularly shares new content. I say "semi-regularly" because finding and writing suitably positive news articles takes time and it appears that "doom and gloom" is the order of the day.
Whilst the news that they share is often from a distant land, I find it extremely interesting to learn about some of the incredible things that have been achieved around the world. The article titled: "‘We are prepared for anything’: onboard Ukraine’s hospital train" is a recent example that I found. It's such a simple idea - create a mobile hospital aboard a train.
All further images, stats, quotes, etc. that I share in this post are from this original source.
The Medical Train
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an organisation that many of you will be familiar with and they've deployed a "Medical Train" to Ukraine - the first time that such an idea has been used within an active warzone.
MSF worked with Ukrainian Railways, the country’s national railway operator, to develop the medical train in the early days of the Russian invasion. It’s made up of eight carriages, including an intensive care unit, an oxygen generator to supply intubated patients, and two carriages for hospital in-patients.
It runs from Donetsk to Lviv (a 24 hour journey covering approximately 1,000km) and can carry 42 patients per trip...
That was March 2022. Since then, MSF’s hospital on rails has completed more than 100 missions and evacuated more than 3,300 patients from the conflict-ravaged east to the relative safety of the west. Besides transporting victims of shell blasts and artillery bombardments, it rescues orphans and pensioners, psychiatric patients and people in need of cancer care.
There's not a huge amount that I can add to the original article and I think that it's worth the few minutes that it will take to read it... I'm immensely impressed as it's something that's probably far more difficult to achieve than the simple idea of "Put a hospital on a train and save people".