Friends, there's no doubt that this year has been challenging on every level here at The Moth, we're thankful for a vibrant moth community made of listeners like you who support confirms that storytelling is a vital source of inspiration, joy and humanity, even during the hardest of times. We're turning to you now to ask that you please remember the moth in your end of year giving if you can support the moth with a new gift of any level before December 31st. At midnight, we would be forever grateful to give simply text give moth to four one four four four.

That's one word. Give e m o t h give moth to four one for four for your continued support will ensure that we can bring you engaging and empathy building stories on our stages and airwaves in 2021 and beyond. Until then, we wish you, your families and your communities a healthy, restful and story where the winter holiday season. This is a moth radio hour from preps. I'm Catherine Byrnes, and today we're going to hear stories about finding your colleagues in medicine, firefighting journalism and politics, like our first storyteller, David Lette, who fell in love with a presidential candidate's message and moved to Washington in the hopes of being called to serve.

I first met David when he called me up a few years ago. He said, Hi, I'm a speechwriter for Obama. Can I buy you a cup of coffee? And I was like, yes, you can. Here's David Litt live at Royce Hall in Los Angeles.

In 2008, I was one of those young people who became obsessed with Barack Obama.

I was a senior in college at the time, and after I graduated, I drove out to Ohio and I worked on his campaign and after the campaign I drove to Washington because hope and change.

And two years later, the White House actually hired me. They hired me to write speeches. And people would hear about my new job and they would say, wow, you must be really good. And I'd say, I don't know, I hope so.

And they thought I was pretending to be humble, but I was entirely sincere.

It's not that I didn't think I had any talent whatsoever.

It's just that I knew there are 300 million people in America and some of them are babies.

But a lot of them are adults, and it just seemed unlikely that I was the best we the people could do.

So every day I walked through the gates of the White House, absolutely sure somebody had made a mistake, and while this was going on, my friends and family were equally sure they now had direct access to the president of the United States.

Like I'm sitting in my White House office and I get a text from my sister, Rebecca, and it says, How come the Department of Homeland Security doesn't have a mailing address?

Now, even in the best of circumstances, this is a disturbing question to get from a family member. But if you work in the White House, you want to know the answer to this kind of stuff, and I have no idea, and it's like this with everything. I mean, suddenly everyone has a law that only I can get through Congress.

Everybody everybody has something wrong with Obamacare that I need to know about.

Mostly everybody has the same question they all want to know. Have you met him yet? Have you met Obama yet? And I say, no, I haven't met him yet.

And I get this look and it's a look I soon learned means you may be 24 years old and working at the White House, but you're still a disappointment to your family and friends.

And I have to say, I totally get it. I mean, everybody thinks that the White House is either like the TV show The West Wing, where everyone's hanging out with the president, or it's like the TV show scandal, where everyone's having sex with the president. But if you're looking for for a Hollywood analogy, the White House is like the Death Star. What I mean by that is just that there's thousands of people, they run around the hallways.

They're all just trying to make sure their little bit of their job works well. And just because Darth Vader is the public face of the organization, it doesn't mean that every stormtrooper gets personal one on one time.

So I try to explain this whole Death Star thing and it doesn't work. I still get that disappointed look.

And frankly, nobody's more disappointed than I am. I mean, nobody wants me to meet the president more than me. And there's two reasons for this.

The first is kind of corny, but it's true.

I moved to Washington because I thought, I don't know what it is, but there must be something I can do for my country. I want to be the kind of person where the president of the United States is just a little bit better at his job because I'm in the room.

And the second reason is I would really like Barack Obama and I to become best friends. Now, now, I'm not saying that every White House staffer imagined that they would become buddies with the president. I'm just saying that none of us ruled it out like you would hear these stories.

You know, somebody got a fist bump in the hallway or someone else got invited up to play cards on Air Force One. And the morale was always the same at any moment. Could be the moment that changes your life forever.

Now, my first chance at a life changing moment came in November 2011 when I was asked to write the Thanksgiving video address.

I will say up front, if State of the Union is all the way on one end of the presidential speech writing spectrum, Happy Thanksgiving.

America is kind of on the other side. But as far as I was concerned, this was the most important set of words Barack Obama would ever say.

And so I threw myself into this. I mean, I wrote and I rewrote and I made edits and then I made edits to the edits.

And finally, the day of the taping came and I went to the diplomatic room, which is one of the most beautiful rooms in the White House. It has this wraparound mural of 19th century American life.

And the advice I always got was you have to act like you've been there before. So so I'm standing there trying to act like I've been there before. And the woman behind the camera takes one look at me and goes, This is your first time here, isn't it?

And I crack immediately. I'm just like, Yes, I have never been here before, please help me. And she says, Don't worry, she explains, her name is Hope Hall.

She films the president all the time. She's going to take care of everything. All I have to do is wait.

So I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait.

And just when I'm wondering, is this whole thing a nightmare? Is it a practical joke? Somebody gets an email on their BlackBerry and they say, OK, he's moving.

And then there's kind of a crackling in the air. And a minute later, President Obama enters the room and he's standing up. So we all stand up and he sits down. So we all sit down.

And he looks at the camera to start taping when hope stops him and she says, actually, Mr. President, this is David. This is the first video he's ever written for you. And President Obama looks at me and he says, Oh.

How's it going, David? I had exactly one thought in that moment. I did not realize we were going to have to answer questions. And I have literally no idea what I said after that. I mean, I actually blacked out like I went home for Thanksgiving and my family was like, so have you met him yet?

And I was like, yeah. And they were like, what did he say? And I was like, how's it going? And they were like, what did you say? And I was like, I don't know.

I blacked out. And I get that disappointed look. And I can't blame anybody, because if I'm going to be the kind of person who makes the president a little bit better at his job when I'm in the room, I am going to have to deal with questions more complicated than how's it going.

And at the moment, there's no indication that I can do it. But I make a promise to myself.

I say if I ever get another shot at a life changing moment, I am not going to let myself down.

And I didn't know if it would ever happen for me, but in fact, it happened just a couple of weeks later, I was sitting in my office.

I got a phone call from the chief speechwriter at the time, a guy named John Favreau, and he called me up and he said Betty White is turning 90 years old and NBC is doing this special where different famous people wish her a happy birthday in these 30 second skits.

And you're pretty funny and no one else wants to do it.

I want to give it a shot. And I said, absolutely.

And again, I understand State of the Union is over here. And happy birthday, Betty White is over there. But this was my Gettysburg Address. And so we had one week to make it perfect.

We started off, John, and I came up with a joke for the president, we were going to have him fill out a birthday card and then while he was filling it out, you would hear his voice on a voice over, say, Dear Betty, you're so young and full of life, I can't believe you're turning 90.

In fact, I don't believe it. Please send a copy of your long form birth certificate to sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C..

So we feel good about the joke, but but we still need a birthday card, so one day that week I go to CVS near the White House as a half block away, I grab a birthday card that I think is going to be pretty good.

And then right when I'm about to leave, I realize we are actually one birthday card.

We need two identical birthday cards because we have two different camera angles. We don't want anyone to know that the president has already written his birthday greeting.

And I think, yes, this is how White House staffers are supposed to feel.

I mean, I've I've saved the day. And so I walk back to that to that Hallmark rack and I get an identical card and I ring it up and I go back to my office and I'm feeling really good.

And then the last thing we need, we need some way to end the video. And so what I come up with is we're going to have the president put in headphones and then he'll listen to the theme song from the Golden Girls, which is Betty White's most popular show.

So I find the perfect pair of headphones that go over the ear that look great on camera, and I listen to the Golden Girls theme song on repeat just to get in the mood.

And then finally on Friday, I get the call. Come on over.

Now, here's what they don't tell you about having a meeting in the Oval Office. When you have a meeting in the Oval Office, you do not just walk into the Oval Office, the first thing you do, you wait in this kind of windowless chamber. It's a little like a doctor's office, except instead of last year's Marie Claire magazine, they have priceless pieces of American art.

And instead of a receptionist, they have a man with a gun who in a worst case scenario, is legally obligated to kill you.

It turns out this little room is the perfect place to second guess every life choice you have ever made.

And so I'm sitting there with Hope Hall, the videographer, and I'm just thinking, do I remember how to explain the joke? Are both of the birthday cards in there? I check my pants pocket. Are the headphones still there? Are the headphones still there? Are the headphones still there? I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown when finally one of the president's aides pokes her head out and says, OK, he's ready for you.

Go on in. To my credit. The first time I entered the Oval Office, I do not blackout, I can remember this very clearly right in front of me.

I can see a painting of the Statue of Liberty that was done by Norman Rockwell that someone has told me is valued at 12 million dollars. And behind me, out of the corner of my eye, I can see the Emancipation Proclamation, not a photocopy of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Emancipation Proclamation, and I can feel the message that this document is sending through the room. And that message is, I'm here because I freed the slaves.

What are you doing here?

And I look I look across the desk at the president and I realize he may also be wondering what I'm doing here, but I feel great.

I mean, I've spent an entire week just practicing how to explain this one joke to the president.

So so I step up, I look at him and I open my mouth.

And what comes out is like, I'm trying to ask for directions, but in Spanish, like the nouns and the verbs are there, but there's nothing in between them. I just say, Betty White video, NBC, very funny.

Everybody laughs SBN and. And the president gives me kind of a confused look, and I hope the videographer jumps in and explains everything and rescues me, but I'm a little concerned because I am here to show the president how professional I am.

And in my professional opinion, we are not off to a great start.

Still, I'm not that worried because I have that second birthday card in my pocket. And so I'm going to get a chance to show President Obama how I save the day.

And as soon as hope is finished filming even I am surprised by how confident I sound when I walk up to the desk and I put my hand down and I say, Mr. President, I'm going to need to take that birthday card and replace it with this identical birthday card because we don't want anyone to know. You've already written your birthday greeting. And President Obama looks up at me and he says. We're we're filming this from all the way across the room, and I say, yes, that's right.

And he says. So no one's going to see the inside of the card. And I say, yes, that's right, and he says, so I can just pretend to write in the card, we don't actually need another one.

And I say yes. And I put the card back in my pocket and it's straight to. But I'm not giving up yet because I made that promise to myself, and besides, I really do feel good about the ending with the headphones. And so the moment hope is done filming her second camera angle, I walk back up to the president and I reach into my pocket and I pull out what looks like a hairball made out of wires.

I don't really know what happened. I guess somewhere in that waiting room, I have just worried this thing into a hopeless tangle and now I don't know what to do. So I just hand the entire thing to the president of the United States. Now, if you work in the White House, you will hear the phrase, there is no commodity on Earth more valuable than a president's time.

Which I always thought was a cliche until I watched Barack Obama. Untangle headphones for 30 seconds. While looking directly at me. And he untangles and untangles, and when he finishes, he looks at hope and just goes. Qadi advance work, and he does it in this way that lets you know that, A, he's only joking and B, he is not even a tiny bit joking.

And I'll tell you, my heart just sinks.

I mean, this was my third chance to make a second first impression on the president and I let myself down and all I want to do is get out of there. And President Obama says something like, well, would it be funnier if I bob my head in time to the music and I say, yeah, that would be funnier, but my heart isn't in it.

I mean, I know I don't belong there. And the president looks into the camera to tape this final scene. And then suddenly he stops. And he says. Well, wait a second, if I'm going to bob my head in time to the music, I need to know how the music goes. Does anyone here know the Golden Girls theme song? And President Obama looks at hope and hope doesn't say anything, so I look at hope and hope doesn't say anything.

So President Obama looks at me and suddenly.

I know exactly what I can do for my country. And so I'm standing there in the Oval Office with the Emancipation Proclamation right behind me. And I look our commander in chief in the eye and I say. Bump, bump, bump, bump. Thank you for being a friend. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, traveled down the road and back up again. Something something you're a pal and a confidante.

But he looks kind of amused, so I keep going, I'm like, and if you threw a party, invited everyone you knew and that's when he gives me a look, that's like, OK, president's time. But it works, President Obama bobs his head in time to the music and Betty White gets her card and NBC gets her special.

And I leave the Oval Office that day with my head held high, knowing that the president of the United States was just a tiny bit better at his job because I was in the room and people still ask me after that.

They still say, have you met him yet? Have you met Obama yet? And I can finally say, yeah, actually, I have. And then just to myself, I think. Not to brag or anything. But technically, I'm thankful he's a friend. Thank you very much. David, with speeches for President Obama from 2011 to 2016. For four years, David was also the lead writer for the president's comedy monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

His memoir about his time at the White House, thanks. Obama was published in 2017. His most recent book, Democracy in One Book or less. How It Works, Why It Doesn't and Why Fixing It Is Easier Than You Think was published in June of this year.

You don't have to be a presidential speechwriter to pitch us a story.

You can just call our pitch line, but we'll let you leave a two minute version of a story you'd like to tell.

The number to call is 877 799 Moth, or you can pitch us a story. Visit our Web site, The Mock Dog. Again, you can pick up your own story by calling 877 799 MOTHE or by going to the morgue dog. Coming up, long before Watergate, a young Carl Bernstein gets his first job at a newspaper. And an inexperienced firefighter must confront a deadly basement fire when the Moth Radio Hour continues. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRICK'S.

This is the Moth Radio Hour from Prick's, I'm Catherine Burns. Our next storyteller is Carl Bernstein. He's a world renowned journalist, but his story is about how we got into the newspaper business in the first place. He told it back in 2006 at the New York Public Library.

Here's Carl Bernstein.

So it's very it's very good that we get to tell these stories and puncture ourselves, and the same is true of my muse, but my my muse, a woman, women, and how I got to be a writer or a journalist is I took typing with the girls.

And this was in 11th grade. And until then, my muse had been been a cue ball with the Silver Spring Recreation Center in Maryland because I shot a lot of pool during school hours and it was kind of represented the kind of student that I was, which is to say most of the day I was at the pool hall and but I was really tired of taking shop, which I had taken since the seventh grade.

And every year you make another one of those trays for your mother that had little things for toothpicks in them in the shape of a fish.

As I said, screw this. I'm not making another game tray with a fish. I'm going to take Taiping with the girls. So I took typing. I was the only guy in the class and it was one of the few classes that I went to. And I quickly got up to 85, 90 words a minute. And it has served me very well in life.

Because my father, recognizing that I was not likely to graduate from high school, had the good sense to say, how would you like to go to work for a newspaper?

Maybe I could get you a job as a copy boy there because he had a friend at the Evening Star, the Washington Evening Star newspaper, who owed him a favor because my father in the McCarthy era had been a source for this guy's reporting on some of the excesses of the McCarthy era. And he said, I think I can get your interview for a job as a copy boy. I didn't know what a copy boy did, but my father correctly perceived that I had some ability to pass a few tests because they were written exams.

And I could kind of bullshit my way through the written exams. And those were the only.

Courses that I could really pass. So I just turned 16 and I was about five foot two and so I went to the Washington Star by the freeway in southeast Washington and I was escorted up to the office of a man named Rudolf Kaufmann, third who was in charge of the copy boys.

And he was the son of the owner, old Washington family. And he had wanted to be a geologist and had gone to Princeton to be a geologist. But the family wanted him to be in the newspaper business.

And so he was in charge of the copy boys, so he said, why do you want to be a copy boy, son? And I said, well, I'd like to get a job. And and I think, you know, maybe sometime I'd like to write. And I you know, I once was a newspaper boy, in fact, for his very newspaper.

And he says, well, let me show you the newsroom.

So he opens up the door and he takes me into this cavernous hall about bigger than this place and is the most exciting thing I ever saw in my life. It must have been about three hundred people.

Among them names well-known later, Mary McGrory, David Broder, Haynes Johnson, a lot of great, great reporters.

But there was an excitement to this place that was unlike anything I've ever seen in my life.

And people were yelling, copy.

And these kids would come running out of nowhere like little squirrels, and they would grab the copy and they would squirrel up to the desk and give it to the editor up there and a guy with an eye shade. And he would start looking at it.

And this was an afternoon paper with five editions in a six hour period. And this place operated like this all day.

And the sports department was in the rear out that way, and so you had ball games going on and people yelling copy in and it would ball scores would come in and there would be a shooting downtown and people would run outside. And I've never seen anything quite like it in my life. And I really want to go to work there. But I didn't get hired. And I couldn't quite figure out why, but I thought maybe because I was too short, because I was only five foot two at the time and I was still growing and I just turned 16.

And most of the copy boys were, you know, they'd come out of the Marine Corps or out of out of Yale.

And they were 22 and 23 and 24.

But I kept coming back and knocking on the door and saying, you know, I really like to go to work here.

And finally, they gave me a typing test.

Piece of cake. Right. So I got hired as a copy boy. Well, the copyboy is doesn't exist anymore, but a copyboy really was an office boy who did every manner of things from running copy. A reporter would be on deadline and he would finish one page of a story and he would yell, copy, and you'd run up and grab it from him, take it to the desk, and then he'd go back typing. And you would have had a room off to the side called a wireless room, which is where all the teletype.

Stuff came in from all over the world, or about 15 of these machines and cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck the whole time, now, of course, you go into a newspaper office and sounds like you're an insurance company. It's got carpet and no typewriters anymore.

But but this place, which is constant noise and motion and and then the copy boys would run and they would go up to the mailroom and get the papers as it came down off the press and put them on a cart and bring them in into the newsroom.

And this was my first day at work and it was so exciting.

And they were telling me, my senior copy boys, the names of all the editors around the desk, the national editor, the Telegraph editor to foreign editor and the foreign editor, also had a little lamp, a little eye shade, which a lot of desk people wore in those days.

And and then it got to be two o'clock.

And they had copyboy, who was actually about 30 years old, came up to me and said, Bernstine. I said, yeah, he says two o'clock. So I had these big repeater clocks going from here all the way to the back of the room. So it was pretty easy to tell. It was two o'clock. I said, yes, two o'clock. He says, well, you're working eight to four shift. Whoever works eight to four shift has to watch the carbon paper.

I say, well, he says, yeah, you know, the eight to four shift, you wash the carbon paper at two o'clock every afternoon.

Well, the reporters would type their stories on six ply paper. There would be we call them books. And in between each of the sheets would be this hideous purple, double sided carbon paper just to type on. It would send a cloud of dust up in the air.

And what you did when you got a story from a reporter, you ran it up to the desk, pulled the carbon paper out, threw it in a basket in his basket, would start to build up like that. And by 2:00 in the afternoon, there would be baskets of kind of all over the place like that. And they had copyboy and Bernstein is two of five. You better go watch that carbon paper. You know, be in deep trouble here.

You get your shift. You got to do. I say, well, where do you watch the carbon paper? What do you think? You watch the carbon paper, you going to be in a men's room and you wash the carbon paper. So, you know, it's my first day at work by now. I'm five foot four and and I've been to no label Louise on G Street.

And I bought myself this cream colored suit and it's the summer, you know, and look like a million dollars of my forty four dollars and twenty five cent a week job and.

I go start collect carbon paper. Well, I'll take one of these baskets and I try to hold it out like this because I don't want to get on my suit from no label.

Lewis and me and my grandfather, who was a tailor, used very carefully, cuffed it and everything and really made it look nice. Hell, this damn thing out. And and I went around and I got a few more pieces of cardboard paper and I put it in the top and somebody said, What are you doing? I said, Oh, I'm going to go wash the carbon paper.

So OK. So, you know, I'm thinking Jesus washed the carbon paper and then I had copyboy because you better hurry up, Bernstine. You better get in there and wash that carbon paper. So I kind of back out in the newsroom like this in the hallway, in the men's room back here. And there's a row of sinks. I look at the sinks and I look also I take one sink and I take this much carbon paper and I put it under there.

The next thing I put a little carbon paper under there, dancing carbon paper under there.

And it was just this was 1960, which was an era when plumbing was changing because they had invented the airfreighted faucet.

So it meant that instead of the faucet like you had in your kitchen, which just water came out, this stream, like from a fire hose would come out.

So I kind of went back like this and I went like that. And all of a sudden there was like this. All faithful. Well, my cream colored suit from no label always looked like I'd been on a safari. I look like a leopard. And at that moment I noticed that behind me while I was kind of trying to dry off the carbon paper, that there was a gentleman who was pulling his flower. And he turned around to me and said, Son, what are you doing?

And I immediately recognized him because he'd been pointed out to me it was Newbold Noize Junior, the editor of the paper. I was very happy to see Mr. Noyes. And I said, oh, Mr. Noyes, two o'clock. I'm just watching the carbon paper. Zipping up his fly and he said, What's your name?

Bernstein said, Mr. Bernstein, I want you to go in that newsroom and you go back there and you tell whoever told you to do this that if I ever find out who was responsible for this or if this is ever done again in this newspaper, that we are going to clean house in the copyboy department.

I mean, you know, I had an inkling.

So I went back to the copyboy who had told me to do this. And I said, you know.

I could leave this business. But I think I'm going to stay. But I don't want to do this again. And that was my first day at work. Thank you. That was Carl Bernstein, Carl shared a Pulitzer Prize with Bob Woodward for his coverage of the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post with Woodward. He's the author of the book All the President's Men. And he also wrote A Woman in Charge The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton and is currently writing a memoir about his apprentice years at The Washington Star.

Our next story was told at one of our story slam competitions in Washington, D.C., where we partner with the public radio station WAMU, the storyteller's job putting out fires nearly got him killed when a basement fire broke out the first night he was on the job. Here's Nick Baskerville live at the mall. Is in a basement, he shouts. That's when I knew. It just got real. That's when I knew I was finally going to get to do what I've been wanting to do for a long time, this is my big opportunity.

We pull up to this house, it's a two story single family home, it's got a attached garage to it. That guy was yelling. That's my very first fire officer. He's probably forgotten more than I'll ever learn. He's a few rooms ahead of me and with me. Well, at that point, I was three months out of recruit school. And this is my very first buya as a full time firefighter. Now, it's not my first buyer.

I've been volunteering for like three years, so I understand it, I get it, and so I've learned that not every time you get put on a house fire is it really a house fire?

Sometimes the report, a house fire is really burnt food on the stove because people put toaster cakes on them.

But not this time. This time I'm I'm at the fire engine and I'm all in this hose and I'm slinging around. I get around to the garage, so I'm blanking it out. Around in two more people show up there from the other crew. We all get adjusted and the decision is made. We need to go through the front door. So we pick up a chance hose line now we go around, we go through the front door all the way to the back.

Down into the basement, and I said this time I realized I might need a pep talk for myself, essay self, I say, huh? I said, look, look here, look here, look, the basement fires are among the most dangerous fires that you're going to deal with. There's only one way in and one way out normally. Get down to the basement, put this thing out. Don't mess around. So that's what we tried to do, we get down to the bottom and we found all the heat, you know, that kind of heat that you feel when you open up your oven and it's been preheated to 500 check.

We found all the darkness in that dark, thick, black smoke. It's the only way I can describe it like this. If you if you take a minute right now and close your eyes. And that level of darkness, you see, that's what I saw. The difference is right now, you can open your eyes. Townsite. About darkness. Can't find the fire. Well, crap, how do you misplace five? And so we're looking I'm looking through doors, I'm looking for anything, it's nothing, and and by now at this point, the heat is gnawing at my ears.

It's gnawing at everything that I'm wearing.

I open up the fire hose and I whip it around to try to get it cooled off.

And if it's not doing anything. Finally, I feel the tap on the shoulder from the other guy says we're going to take it out and try something different. So out we go out the front door, now we're around to the side and we found another entrance in this time, all we can see is fire.

And now I'm doing it, I've opened it up and I am getting it, I am doing my job.

Why are you laughing at me? And in the process, I hear the sound and sound of air horns.

Oh, man, that's the signal that the fire chief gives you, that he wants you to evacuate out of the building because there's a problem. And I walk out with this attitude like stupid fire chief with 30 years experience.

We were doing it. You don't even know you weren't there.

You went, oh, because then I realized that the entire second floor and the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire.

But that wasn't the scary part as time goes on and my understanding of fire behaviour increases, I attend a class called The Art of Reading Smoke, and it has all kinds of new new science and understanding.

And one of the things they say in there is that smoke is fuel. Like the fuel, the smoke that me and my crew were covered in, as we said at the bottom, and I realized the only reason why we weren't hurt is because I never found that spark in looking for that fire.

And it's as that that moment I've come to appreciate not getting what I want exactly when I want it. Thank you.

Nick Baskerville is an air force that with 14 years of service.

Nick tells us I'm now an officer at the fire service, the person expected to do what my officer did for me every day. It's my hope to help protect the people I work with for the dangers they don't know exist.

If I can take care of them, they can take care of the public. Coming up, a young physician working out of a makeshift medical tent in Syria must make a difficult choice. That's next on the Moth Radio Hour.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange Pyrex Dog.

This is the Moth Radio Hour from Pretz. I'm Catherine Burns, and our final story is from Dr Vivian Huang. Vivian is a physician who has done work for Doctors Without Borders. She contacted us to suggest a number of her colleagues are storytellers. But after hearing one of her stories, I knew we had to get her up on the stage.

Here's Dr Vivian Huang live at The Moth. It is the dead of summer temperatures are swelling above 100 degrees, the hot desert sun is unrelenting. It is the end of Ramadan and the beginning of Eid. It is usually a time of celebration, but intense fighting has broken out. I am a medical doctor with Doctors Without Borders in northern Syria. The war has been raging for over three years now. People aren't going to work. Children aren't going to school, there is no safe place.

There is no clean running water, there is no electricity, and the health care system has collapsed. Just a couple months ago. My surgical colleagues were operating a small operation inside a secret cave.

They had to crawl into a small entrance to get inside. Inside, there was an inflatable operation tent. Some emergency beds. And chalky dust everywhere, but they managed to take care of patients. Since the war has begun, the Syrian government has been attacking health care facilities. And health care personnel. The patients that are looking for care are in danger, and the people that take care of the patients are also in danger. We have now upgraded to a building that was once a chicken farm.

There are no more chickens there, but this isn't like a scene out of the episode of Grey's Anatomy.

That afternoon. I was assigned to look over people that were sick but stable. It is one room divided into many areas. There is a triage area, there's an inflatable operating tent, there's a maternity ward, and also in the front, we asked that the patients leave their weapons there. Earlier in the day, there was intense, heavy bombing. The government like to bomb when people got out of mosque because they could get more bang for their buck.

There was chaos in the hospital. People were lying everywhere. And there I saw this man. He was laying in the middle of it. He had been wounded by shrapnel. Earlier, we had stopped his bleeding and bandaged him up. But he looked uncomfortable to me. So I tried to ask him in Arabic, are you in pain? And he wouldn't look at me. And so I thought maybe he didn't hear me, so I tried to walk closer to him.

And I felt a little scared because he was a big guy twice my size, but I mustered up a little bit more courage and in Arabic, I asked him, are you in pain?

And to my surprise, he didn't look at me, but in English, he said, cover your hair, cover your hair. And I was a bit surprised. When he said that because I had already been covered from neck down, as was customary for foreign women working in Syria. His comments sent me into a time. Where I endured sexism and gender inequality. When I was little, my grandmother would always tell me stuff growing taller, we can't marry you off.

And when I was 10 years old.

My father wouldn't let me get glasses, I couldn't see the chalkboard, and he said, if you had glasses, you wouldn't be pretty and we couldn't marry you off.

He said, you have it a lot better. Your great grandmother in China, she had her feet bound. And my aunties, I would hear often the times they would say. Boys are easier to take care of than girls. Boys are just better than girls, but through all of that sexism and through all of the favouring of boys over girls, my family did value education. And so as a little kid, my father would go around telling people I was going to be a doctor and lucky for him, I also did feel the same way.

Medicine fascinated me.

I absolutely love the bugs that invaded the bodies.

And when I was in college, there was an Ebola outbreak in Congo. And I was just fascinated how this bug could wreak such havoc on the body.

And so I read everything I could about this outbreak. And that's when I discovered Doctors Without Borders, Doctors Without Borders is an international humanitarian organization that was started in nineteen seventy one, and their basic principles are impartiality, neutrality, independence.

And it is because of these tenants, they're able to go to places and do the work that they do. And when I was in college, I said to myself, one day, I'm going to be a doctor with that organization and I'm going to try to help and alleviate the suffering in the world.

And years went by and I went to medical school and I thought that being a doctor, I could level the playing field a bit.

That being a doctor, I wouldn't have to face sexism, but I think that was a bit naive because when I was in training, nurses would rather take orders from a male doctor. Patients would always say what a nice nurse you are.

And Doc, female doctors still get paid less than male doctors. And many of my female colleagues feel the same way. But despite that, I finished my training and I was accepted into Doctors Without Borders.

And there I was in Syria, I thought I had made all my dreams come true, that I'd become a doctor and I have fought all the sexism and the gender inequality.

But here I was with this man. He was wounded and he needed help.

But in that second, he took everything away from me that I had worked so hard to fight against.

And I was just so angry at him and I just wanted to walk away. I thought you you must be not that sick. I'll just let you be there and you can just suffer. But my conscience wouldn't let me do that.

I couldn't watch him suffer. And I thought about how we were meeting at that particular moment and that he believed in something so strong that his religion brought him there with his suffering. And then I thought about why I was there is because I believe so strongly in medicine. And that came before being a woman, and so for him, religion was like medicine. For me, religion trumped everything, even his suffering, even equality for women.

And so I met him where he was. And I forgave him at that moment and I let go of that anger in that moment. And I was a doctor first and a woman second. So I did what he asked me to do, I went into another room, I took the purple scarf that was around my neck, I wrapped it around my hair. I went back out. I gave him some pain medicine, and then I put him in an ambulance for him to go to Turkey in hopes that he would get better care.

Inshallah.

Thank you. That was Dr Vivian Hwang Vivien's was a physician and epidemiologist who previously worked for the organization Partners in Health.

I asked Vivian if there's a follow up to the story she wrote. I feel like now is such a crucial time in our history to tell stories of what it's really like in places where violence is the norm, especially when the world is becoming so much more xenophobic. I'm in New York seeing patients at a tuberculosis clinic these days, and last month I saw a Syrian refugee family and immediately I felt a closeness to all of them. In some ways, I breathed a sigh of relief and seeing this family from Syria now in New York City restored my faith a little in this current political climate.

That's it for this episode, we hope you'll join us next time for the Moth Radio Hour. Your host this hour was the most artistic director, Catherine Burns. Catherine also directed the stories and the show.

The rest of the most directorial staff include Sara Habermann, Sara Austin Ginés, Jennifer Hickson, and make Bolls production support from Timothy Luly special thanks to Paul Holden, Graber and everyone and live at the New York Public Library.

More stories are true, is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by the drift of music. In this hour from the TV theme players Max Rubberneck Still Waggons Infonet and Jamie Sieber. The Moth is produced for Radio by me Jay Allison with Viki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by Prox. For more about our podcast.

For information on pitching us your own story and everything else, go to our Web site, The Moth, Doug.