In the Name of the Children

Chris Hansen, a Board Member and MFP volunteer has recently published his long-awaited autobiography. In exciting prose and accompanied by extraordinary photos, the book chronicles Chris’ forty years working with poor children in the US and with war victims throughout the world. The story begins just after Chris finished his medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and pediatric residency at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His first job was as physician at the White Mountains Apache Reservation in Arizona , with short stints caring for Hopi and Navajo in New Mexico. Chris heard of an exciting new clinic in the delta of Mississippi, the Tufts Mound Bayou clinic, and in the midst of the civil rights movement became a physician in all black community on the Mississippi delta. In the years that followed Chris found himself in refugee camps from two wars in Africa:Biafra and Rwanda, in Kurdistan, Iraq, Jordan, and other conflict zones around the world.

His chapter, ‘Opening Hearts in Baghdad” describes Chris’ work with Medicine For Peace in Iraq after the first Gulf War. Even after returning to the US, Chris labored ceaselessly to have the UN sanctions rescinded as he saw first-hand the devastating effects the sanctions had on the lives of Iraqi children,

Dr. Hansen has experienced the triumphs and frustrations of trying to free children from disease, the brutality of war, the web of poverty and in this book, he offers wise, practical advice for protecting children in the future.

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