At this time of year, it’s great to look at good people and good deeds. David Robinson reads a friend’s memoir with a sense of humbling awe.

From Scotland with Love
By Fred Bridgland
Published by KDP

The road down Mount Igman to Sarajevo wasn’t much of a road at all – more of a forest track, really – and when the city was under siege by the Serbs, for the last one and a half miles it effectively meant driving through a battlefield. All the way down by the side of the road were wrecks of burnt-out  lorries, buses and military vehicles that never made it, hit by Serbian artillery and mortar fire.

On 28 April 1995, Denis Rutovitz, a 61-year-old mathematician and geneticist from Edinburgh, was in the passenger seat of a 13-tonne Bedford truck making that very journey. He knew the route over Mount Igman well enough to know why everyone called it the most dangerous road in Europe, how you could almost get mesmerised by the tracer fire coming towards you as you sped downhill, how you could never really trust the military police’s assessment whether or not that last section of the mountain – single track, steep, completely exposed – might be safe. Already that day, they’d seen one truck on it set ablaze by Serb artillery from across the valley.

Everyone on the mission called Denis’s truck Big Ted. It led the other nine in the convoy downhill towards the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, which had been under siege by Serbian forces for three years – five months longer than the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War and the longest siege of a capital in the twentieth century.

The last lorry in the convoy was nicknamed Big Yin, driven by a volunteer mechanic called Andy Sutherland. He was already speeding down the Mount Igman track in pursuit of the other eight when a mortar shell hit one of the lorry’s wheels. Sutherland lost control and the Big Yin slithered upside down, with him still in the cab, down the flank of the mountain and into a ravine, where it split open.

It was only later, when he got down the mountain, and caught up with Big Ted, that he saw the passenger window that had been shattered by the heavy machine gun bullet on its way to Denis Rutovitz’s heart.

*

Because I can, I’ll stop that bullet just before it hits, and leave it where I first heard about Denis Rutovitz – on page 50 of Fred Bridgland’s excellent book From Scotland With Love, a history of Edinburgh Direct Aid, which Rutovitz founded in 1992, and which since then has been doing its bit to relieve pain and suffering not just in Bosnia but Kenya, Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, Kashmir, Sri Lanka and Ukraine.

Full disclosure: Fred is a friend, such a good friend in fact that I’m almost tempted to prove my objectivity by writing a stinker of a review.  But I can’t, because how could anybody not be moved by admiration, wonder and yes, a small amount of guilt, at the stories it contains. Guilt first: Not only have I not written them a cheque but I haven’t dropped off any school supplies, toiletries, waterproof clothing and fleeces, good shoes and boots (apparently they’re OK right now for bedding, blankets, sleeping bags and tents) at their warehouse on 16a West Harbour Road, Edinburgh, EH5 1PN (11am-3pm Wednesdays and Sundays). In fairness, I can’t beat myself up about this because until I read Fred’s book I didn’t know very much about EDA.

But the rather larger feeling of guilt is that From Scotland With Love is full of stories of people who act with levels of courage and moral responsibility on a scale I find absolutely humbling.

Suppose, for example, my wife and I had planned a walking holiday in Crete and a war broke out across the Adriatic in the Balkans. Chances are, we would go on that holiday. What we wouldn’t do is what Rutovitz and his wife Jeanne did in 1992: cancel the holiday and instead drive across Europe and deliver thousands of pounds worth of non-perishable food, toiletries, medicines and dressings to Croatia.

Or again, suppose I had read about the Rutovitzs’ mission, would I then, like 52-year-old Christine Witcutt, a Wishaw primary school teacher just beginning to enjoy retirement, want to join them on their convoy to Sarajevo, already a city under an 11-month siege in March 1993? And if, when Christine was killed by a bullet in Sniper’s Alley, would I be able to bring myself to say what her husband Alan did to Scottish reporters when asked, on returning from Bosnia, what he would say to the people who shot his wife, ‘I’m trying to forgive them’? I don’t think I would have such grace.

(Christine Witcutt lives on in the form of a day care centre for children with special needs in Sarajevo, which needs £25,000 a year to run its home visiting service. Donations can be sent to www.christinewitcuttfund.org.)

There are so many unsung heroes in Fred’s book that I almost lose count. The only one I’d heard of is John Home Robertson, MP or MSP for East Lothian for nearly three decades, but even then I knew nothing of his work for EDA building a brick kitchen and community centre near a Kenyan bush orphanage with his son, providing an earthquake-hit Himalayan village with a permanent clinic and temporary shelter in a bitterly cold winter and assessing flood damage by horseback after the Pakistan floods of 2011. What a tremendous human being – and him a politician too!

And what about Maggie Tookey? A retired teacher who cycled around the world (!) and then became EDA’s international field operations director. She worked alongside Home Robertson in all of those places and more – like for example, Kosovo, which some observers thought an even more vicious civil war than Bosnia’s. And then Lebanon, where, in 2014, in a border town flooded with refugees from Assad’s Syria, she was the only western aid worker in a camp riddled with Isis supporters. In setting up classes for electricians, plumbers, computer literacy and first aid at a time when she was an obvious target, living alone with no security apart from a rusty door, her courage was and is (she’s in Ukraine now) off the scale.

All of these stories are told in Fred’s book after Page 50, so I really ought to go back to finish telling the story of Denis Rutovitz.

The 12.7mm heavy machine-gun bullet that smashed Big Ted’s passenger window did indeed hit him in the heart area. These bullets are bigger than you’d think – over four inches long – and this one went straight through the flak jacket and through his chest wall. It just missed his lung but bruised it, causing internal haemorrhaging.

And yet he lived. He still lives, aged 95, honoured with an MBE for his work (his wife Jeanne, Professor Emeritus of Neuropathology at Edinburgh University technically outranks him with a CBE). Edinburgh Direct Aid – now renamed Edinburgh Direct Aid International – lives on too. Rutovitz  wants to step down from leading the organisation, but for it to remain what it always has been – nimble, volunteer-run (its website is quite basic: always a good sign money isn’t being needlessly diverted), ideally with more young people involved. ‘There is a dearth of young people turning up to do work in the field,’ he says, ‘which is the purpose that justifies our existence.’ If young people’s internationalism and idealism is indeed on the wane, we should all be worried.

When in Ukraine, Edinburgh Direct Aid likes to work with a partner organisation whose name translates as Small Wins. That, it seems to me, is exactly what EDA offers. In the scheme of things – the 100,000 killed, 2.2 million displaced, the 12,000-20,000 women raped in the Bosnian war, for example – you can argue that these wins are so small that they don’t add up to very much at all to put on the other side of the ledger.

Yet in that war former BBC journalist Martin Bell (who writes the foreword to Fred’s book) singled EDA out for their effectiveness, and I’m sure that hasn’t changed since. Those trucks being loaded up at West Harbour Road, those EDA containers sent from Grangemouth, are launched into the world by a charity which doesn’t pay its CEO a five-figure salary or indeed anything at all: no-one is paid except staff in destination countries. It doesn’t use expensive advertising or rely on others to deliver aid ‘and a hand of friendship, in person, always’.

So while it doesn’t counterbalance the horrors of war, at least EDA’s small wins add up to something. Whether it’s  famine or a flood, invasion or civil war – or doing the rebuilding work after all of them –  it’s always something.

From Scotland With Love by Fred Bridgland is published by KDP, price £15 (plus £3 postage) and can be ordered from https://www.peoplesfundraising.com/shop/from-scotland-with-love.