Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.

Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the Radio Broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit bbc.co.uk-radio4

My cast away this week is the nurse and humanitarian Dame Claire Birchinger.

She's worked for the Red Cross in over a dozen countries, including Sudan, Sierra Leone, Kenya,

Afghanistan, Lebanon and Liberia.

Amid the sort of raw human suffering that most of us find, even on the TV,

virtually unbearable to witness.

In fact, it was through Michael Birch's landmark news reports on the Ethiopian famine 30 years ago

that she first grabbed our attention.

We saw her as a young nurse surrounded by thousands of starving people and forced daily

to make the truly terrible decision of choosing who to feed.

Throughout the years, she's won numerous plaudits and awards,

but her Florence Nightingale medal pretty much says it all,

given to honour those who've distinguished themselves in times of war

by exceptional courage and devotion to the wounded, sick or disabled.

She says, I don't just live to eat and sleep and get money to have a nice house.

I have to create value. I have to do something in life.

Let's talk, first of all, then, clear about this impulse to do something.

For you, it has meant devoting your life to being in parts of the world where people are really suffering.

No, I think as much too serious.

...