"...We arrived in the capital Maputo, and they said 'Hurry up, there's a plane waiting here'. We went in a small plane to the flood and jumped in a helicopter with a radio and bag of food. I had a box of medication and I think we had a tent. They landed in a safe area. The pilot gave us a pat on the back and he left. And there was just the radio, the food, the tent and the box of medication. It was my first time in Africa..."
That was Melie De Champlain’s introduction to Mozambique. It was also the Quebec nurse’s first experience with Doctors Without Borders/Medicine Sans Frontieres (MSF), an international humanitarian organization that sends healthcare professionals to troubled areas in developing countries. She, along with hundreds of other doctors, nurses and administrators, volunteer their skills in places forgotten by the world’s television cameras, places where conflict, famine and disease have made everyday survival a struggle. Here are their stories…
JOE LEBERER, COORDINATOR AND LOGISTICIAN FOR ZAMBIA, SIERRA LEONE, DRC
WHAT WERE YOU DOING BEFORE YOU JOINED MSF?
I got my undergrad at McGill University (in Montreal) in Anthropology, graduated in 1995 and did tree planting – ten years of it in British Columbia. That was all through my undergrad at McGill and it just continued on. I worked my way up the company ladder as a foreman and supervisor.
WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO JOIN MSF?
In the fall of 1999 I quit tree planting. I hopped on my bike and did a bike trip, not knowing what was coming up next. It was really toward the end of that trip I thought ‘I want to travel, I want to get into something different.’ I guess I had a nagging in my soul that I wanted to do something a little more useful. So it really was a natural conclusion that I should apply for MSF and see what kind of overseas work was available.
WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST DESTINATION?
Western Zambia, which was with Angolan refugees. It was a classic emergency in a classic refugee camp. The people were extremely unhealthy – they had literally fled their homes running in the last round of violence in eastern Angola. And they came in an extremely poor state of health. Many of them had lost family members and watched them get shot in the worst kind of violence they were fleeing. The population was really desperate. So when we set up the program, we set up a nutritional feeding program, inpatient services, pharmaceutical services, malaria…really, we had a whole mini-hospital right there in the refugee camp.
WHAT WAS YOUR JOB?
My job was logistician – to get all the equipment the medical staff needed, to make sure all their vehicles were working, that the actual structure of the tents and the setups was all done right. But after I got there the project leader had to quit. So that left me as the project coordinator almost right away.
HOW DID THAT PROJECT TURN OUT?
One of the reasons why I say it was a classic first mission was because we started it up, watched the statistics and state of health and then started thinking about how we should close this project. Luckily the Zambian government moved in and offered the refugees a plot of land – indefinitely.
WHAT OTHER PROJECTS HAVE YOU DONE?
I did DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), which was night and day from this first mission. The DRC was at war – still is– and you could tell, just flying in and landing in the airport for the first time and going on to Kisangani which is where I worked. You could feel the heaviness in the air, the political tension. You just saw guys in army fatigues carrying various types of weapons; you could just feel this heaviness. As it turns out, we were running a nutritional project in Kisangani. It was a massive program. We had 16 different feeding centers and just the challenges of managing kept us far away from the people we were trying to help. It was much more about dealing with politicians. It was a huge challenge for me – it was completely exhausting.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO IN THE FUTURE?
I definitely want to be in the field again. I want to be working with the people. For me the most rewarding thing is to be there…
SHELINA MUSAJI, DOCTOR IN TURKMENISTAN, ANGOLA
TELL US ABOUT YOUR EDUCATIONAL AND GENERAL BACKGROUND.
I did my MD at the University of Toronto and my residency was at the University of Western Ontario.
WHAT GOT YOU INTERESTED IN WORKING FOR THE ORGANIZATION?
The people, the travel, the need. There’s a lot of stuff. I guess I identified some of it as a medical student, but I knew I couldn’t do much without a degree. In 1997 I went on my own to Pakistan to volunteer at a hospital there, because I needed more international experience before working with MSF. So I did that for about five months and then I joined MSF when I got back in ’98.
WHERE WAS YOUR FIRST MISSION?
It was a country called Turkmenistan in the former Soviet Union. We worked on a tuberculosis program focusing on how to implement tuberculosis programs in areas where it’s endemic or epidemic.
WHAT WAS IT LIKE?
If you look that area, there’s definitely an endemic or epidemic level of tuberculosis. Our country director had a general interest in the environmental problem there, so it was a unique program within MSF that actually linked health and environment. One of the hard medical issues they found was TB because the old Soviet system no longer existed. There was definitely no medication at all. They had mass screenings during the Soviet times with chest x-rays and that wasn’t available anymore.
HOW DID YOU FIND THE STANDARD OF LIVING AND CULTURE IN THESE COMMUNITIES?
Wonderful people, very warm but with a low standard of living. So little food, little money, but warm hearts and very open…
WHAT WERE THE POSITIVE ASPECTS OF THAT PROGRAM?
We had pretty good results in terms of the TB program – some of the best, I think, of the MSF programs in the former Soviet Union. We had great cure rates, great completion rates and it was definitely because of the motivation of the people and our staff because we had well-trained doctors and nurses who stuck with the program.
AND HAVE YOU CONTINUED WITH OTHER PROJECTS?
Yes, I finished in 2000, went to Zambia and worked in a refugee camp for Angolan refugees that came across the eastern border.
AND HOW WAS THAT DIFFERENT FROM YOUR PREVIOUS EXPERIENCES?
Completely different. I’m a generalist, so this is what I prefer to do. It’s almost like having a health care hospital within the camp, ranging from feeding centers for malnourished children to delivering to child health, to immunization programs, trying to do public health in the camp.
WHAT ARE THE REWARDS OF OVERSEAS HEALTHCARE WORK?
Medicine is completely different in that part of the world than it is here. Here we’re making people live to 80 or making their quality of life better. But there you have people in their thirties or forties with childhood diseases that don’t even exist here anymore. So just trying to do primary public health – for example the TB program, which can affect thousands and thousands of lives – you never have that same impact here.