"I think I told somebody that when I'd been through 60 countries, I stopped counting. And what would I say in the future? I would recommend travel to any young person. Definitely professionally or especially professionally, that's possible nowadays there are a lot of scholarships. But also personally and, if possible, to live in that environment for a while and to understand what problems and worries these people have, how it works, and how children learn in school. And above all, to be inquisitive. Everything is interesting. I've always been interested in how they make pottery, how they print newspapers, how they build a house, how they cut wood. And especially how they live, what kind of relationships they have, how they treat each other, how they treat their parents, how they treat their children. That's all a great benefit, not to mention learning a language. I think today, without knowing a foreign language, it's bad, the world is coming together, and it's important to get along. When I was doing job interviews, they don't ask you how you speak English anymore, they just talk to you in English, and if you don't understand, you fail. It's a complete given to speak English."
"The other benefit from Africa, I want to say, was the nature of the blacks. I grew very fond of them. At that time, there was this reversal of apartheid. When somebody got into a high position... I fought with a civil servant in the ministry there, where he wanted to show me his superiority. But basically, the people there were terribly grateful. Even when they had big losses, when, for example, these children were dying, the mothers there were really very heartfelt. They could cry it out. Black people can live in the present because of their life experiences. And that's very rare because they can rejoice even when they have nothing, even when they're hungry. They celebrate everything by dancing, by singing. That was really a great insight. And I must say that, unfortunately, I don't keep any correspondence with them because they are not used to writing letters. I remember it very fondly. I wasn't afraid to go anywhere in that community when we went on a trip, for example. I was handicapped by not having a proper car. Other than that, I loved going out into the countryside. I'm glad I was able to show that to my child at the time."
"As life went on, time passed. We had the year '68, and in that year, a lot of people emigrated. I tried to emigrate too, but my mother couldn't get over it, so I returned from England. That was adventurous, too. I got on the train and had no ticket, no money, nothing. People helped me on the train, they invited me to join them. I was in Bremen for a while, then they took me to England. I went to Essex, and I stayed there for a while. My mother wrote me desperate letters. I was an only child, so eventually I came back. And when I came back, there were vacancies because many people were missing, especially in the faculty, so I got into the children's faculty and worked as a research assistant. I wanted to do, at that time, it was a CSc., which is now a PhD."
Marie Krausová was born in Prague on 17 March 1942. Her parents were both civil servants. Her father was fired from his job at the ministry after 1948 and had to work manually for several years. Marie Krausová graduated from the gymnasium and managed to enrol to study dentistry, from where she switched to study paediatrics after three years. She worked briefly in the border area, and in 1968, she initially decided to emigrate, but at her mother‘s insistence, she returned to Czechoslovakia from her stay in the UK. She devoted her life to paediatrics and sports medicine. In the 1980s, she travelled to Zambia with her eight-year-old daughter and worked as a doctor in the paediatric ward at Lusaka Hospital. After 1989, she decided to continue working as a humanitarian worker in various parts of the world. She worked with People in Need in Kosovo until the beginning of the war and participated in a vaccination campaign in Ghana. In cooperation with the UN, she carried out her last humanitarian action in Bangladesh in 2000-2004. She continued her travels privately. She has visited dozens of countries in her lifetime, many of them as an aid worker. She has written books about her experiences, ‚A Doctor in Zambia‘ and ‚A Doctor in Bangladesh‘.
