Waheed Arian

As we’ve watched the war in Ukraine unfold, we’ve seen huge crowds of people queuing at the border, dragging small suitcases, carrying babies and children, leaving their homeland behind. Dr Waheed Arian knows what it’s like to be forced to leave your home, suddenly, and under fire; he’s a refugee from an earlier war, the Soviet-Afghan War, which lasted for almost ten years and claimed the lives of as many as two million Afghan civilians. Five million people are estimated to have left the country as refugees, and Waheed Arian was one of them.

In 1988, at the age of five, he escaped on horseback from Afghanistan to Pakistan, arriving at a refugee camp on the North-West frontier. In the camp he almost died from malnutrition, malaria and TB. But – just in time - he managed to get medical treatment, and the doctor who treated him inspired an ambition to be a doctor himself. Dr Waheed Arian is now an A and E doctor in the NHS and he has founded a pioneering medical charity, Arian Teleheal. He has received many awards for his work, and has written about his life in a vivid memoir, “In the Wars”.

In a moving conversation with Michael Berkeley, Waheed describes the dangerous journey that brought him to Britain, where he was at first imprisoned in Feltham Young Offenders Institution. He reveals how he fulfilled his early ambition to become a doctor, despite having had almost no schooling. And he chooses music which takes him back to childhood, watching Bollywood films with his family, and to his early years in Britain, when he was befriended by an old woman who played Schubert to him. Other choices include music by Charlie Chaplin, and a song by Ahmad Wali, who like Waheed fled Afghanistan.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media Production for BBC Radio 3.