12 FYi • Profile


IN THE LINE OF FIRE


I


F HOLLYWOOD were to make a film about humanitarian aid doctors, there would be guns, lots of them, and plenty of blood too, no doubt. There would be border-crossings at night with a local guide, life-saving operations in a dusty cave lacking in the most basic resources, and a rock-hard floor on which to steal a few hours’ sleep. Meanwhile, helicopters would rain down rockets and bombs onto the surrounding area, the explosions punctuating conversations among the medical staff.


And despite Hollywood’s reputation for


hyperbole, this would not be an exaggeration. Indeed, this is exactly what has been happening in the recent conflict in Syria, where surgeons from the humanitarian charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have been working under the most extreme conditions to treat the horrendous casualties of a modern war.


But there are other types of care going on


too – perhaps less dramatic, certainly no less important – in this organisation of 25,000 people providing emergency aid to the needy and dispossessed around the world, including eight million outpatient consultations and over 70,000 surgical procedures a year. And whatever the circumstances, be it a conflict situation, a cholera epidemic or a devastating earthquake, the requirements for medical staff are usually the same: medical know-how, of course, but also an ability to keep a cool head when all around are losing theirs and the best-laid plans are going wildly off-course.


Facing danger Dr Angeline Wee, a GP from Singapore, has done two missions with MSF, one of seven months to post-earthquake Haiti and one of nine months to the conflict-torn Democratic


Republic of Congo last year. In both cases, events took a turn for the unexpected. “Haiti was meant to be a fairly simple, stable first mission,” she says, “but it turned out to be quite complex, because this was just before cholera hit, before the elections in December and we were also preparing for the coming hurricane.” Her regular duties involved delivering care


from a bus-cum-clinic in a camp controlled by gangsters and also working in a clinic set up on a golf course owned by the actor Sean Penn


Doctors with Médecins Sans Frontières risk their lives to provide care in the most extreme settings. Adam Campbell finds out more about this remarkable organisation


Tomas and then again in preparation for the anticipated electoral chaos. “It was a difficult time – a lot of the


surrounding NGOs were pulling out because of the deteriorating security situation, so people started coming to us.” In the Congo, Angeline was in charge of an


outreach project supporting two clinics in the mountains near Kitchanga. Based just 50 km away, her weekly three-day visits would nevertheless involve a six-hour road trip taking medical supplies and a small supervisory team to the clinics. She had got used to dealing with the


associated security issues – “I had never spoken to anyone holding a gun before” – when the conflict suddenly escalated, and the subsequent displacement of people raised the medical stakes further. “In one of the areas there was a refugee


camp of about 20,000 people, so we had to set up a cholera treatment unit. There were cases of measles as well. I had never even been part of a measles vaccination campaign and suddenly here I was in charge of one! It was really intimidating.”


“ It was meant to be a simple first mission - but then a cholera epidemic hit and we had to prepare for a hurricane.”


(later, she would move to a primary care clinic attached to the paediatric hospital). But events meant she was suddenly involved in setting up a new cholera treatment centre in Port-au- Prince, as well as a number of 24-hour emergency centres, first ahead of Hurricane


Political resistance By contrast, the intimidation encountered by Dr Johann McGavin, who is now a trainee GP in Brighton, during his nine-month mission to Zimbabwe was of a different nature altogether. There, he was working mainly to


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