Walk alongside author and acupuncturist Mateo Bernal as he endeavors to establish a community-based clinic in the grim and over-crowded Shatila Refugee Camp in Beirut, a veritable healthcare desert. The immediacy and power of his blog entries - flanked on either end in this collection by insightful essays about healthcare delivery, community and the oppression of marginalization - bring the reader into the realities of the refugee camp and the difficulties of achieving even modest improvements in a community's health. Drawing on both working and teaching experiences in different communities with unique circumstances, from Lebanon to Mexico, Bernal's writing is fresh, compelling and conveys the range of human experience - hope, fear, love, anger, despair, humor, jubilation, frustration, misunderstanding, comprehension and unflagging determination.