Global Hero

The heroic efforts of a Chester medic to help those suffering in a war-torn region will touch your heart, writes MARTIN PILKINGTON

- Martin Pilkington

LISTEN to Dr Waheed Arian’s clipped, confident Cambridge tones and you may conclude that he’s followed a pretty conventional route into the medical profession. You’d be very wrong. And if you thought Arian was settling for a standard career path you’d be compounding the error.

‘I arrived alone in London from Afghanistan aged 15 with just $100,’ he says. ‘I worked doing a sales job in a shop in Edgware Road and then did kitchen porter and cleaning jobs, so for the first two years here I juggled work with studying English and reading schoolbooks on the way there, at work, and late in the evening.’ After taking his GCSEs he enrolled in three different colleges to study five ‘A’ levels in the evenings...gaining five A grades.

Paradoxically it was an unsettled and at times terrifying childhood that drove Dr Arian to become a high achiever and then some – earlier this year he became the first Briton to be given a Unesco Global Hero Award in New York, giving a speech before over 400 world leaders at the ceremony. He was born in Kabul during the Soviet occupation; fled with his family to a refugee camp in Pakistan where they suffered near starvation and he and several of his siblings contracted malaria and tuberculosis; then returning to a briefly peaceful Afghanistan found it quickly engulfed by civil war.