If you are living in these types of locations, then you should know how difficult it could be to get much-needed aid. That is the main goal of organizations such as Doctors Without Borders. Doctors Without Borders is one of the largest non-profit groups that aim to alleviate human suffering, especially in troubled areas around the world. This article aims to discuss what Doctors Without Borders is all about, and how they help make lives better one day and one step at a time. It was founded in Paris, Francis in by a group of journalists and doctors that were witnesses to civil war and national calamities, as well as the health concerns of the people living in those areas.
Merging the Emergency Medical and Surgical Intervention Group and the French Medical Relief together, Doctors Without Borders started their first mission in Nicaragua in , where an earthquake killed tens of thousands of people.
This was followed by a medical relief mission in the Honduras where it was struck by Hurricane Fifi. During the s, the organization added further members, making it an international group. The first countries that joined MSF included:. In total, Doctors Without Borders operates in over 70 countries and employs over 36, workers and volunteers.
Their personnel mostly comprise of doctors, nurses, and other health workers. Other specialists such as engineers and administrative personnel also work within the group.
The mission of Doctors Without Borders is to alleviate pain and suffering of people who are living in high-risk areas, such as those with ongoing epidemics, civil unrest or war, or those hit with natural calamities.
While the missions that Doctors Without Borders are wide in scope, they can be broken down into the three major tasks as indicated below. Vaccinations, emergency surgeries, and treating the sick are done in the field. Some missions also require them to put up health centres and clinics to better accommodate patients.
Typically, victims of conflict as well as those infected by an outbreak are treated, although they also conduct medical missions for other purposes such as for treatment of mental problems and health education, among others.
Aside from treatment, Doctors Without Borders also work towards the prevention of disease and improving the quality of health in the locale.
The group helps provide access to clean water, provide resources for proper sanitation and hygiene, and implement programs to fight malnutrition. In order to do these projects, Doctors Without Borders employs a team of specialists and experts such as engineers and logistics teams to make their projects possible.
They come armed with MSF's premade medical kits, which contain a vast array of supplies needed for a given situation; if workers are fighting epidemics, they may bring the vaccination kit, while workers with the surgical kit will have everything they need to operate. Having these kits ready-made allows MSF to respond to emergencies quickly. Despite this logistical legwork, field staff face primitive and dangerous conditions.
They may travel to see patients by canoe or by camel. Doctors have been victims of kidnappings and killings, though so far, MSF has only pulled out of North Korea and Afghanistan for reasons related to staff safety. Those selected to work in the field go through in-depth security briefings as part of the rigorous training process.
For a doctor, a day's work may include seeing patients, training local caregivers and arranging shipments of food to the malnourished. It's difficult to describe what the experience will be like; returning volunteers have described feeling "useless" in the face of such gigantic problems [source: Bortolotti ].
It's easy to be frustrated by the things that can't be accomplished or by the people who can't be saved, but participants say that it's an eye-opening and vibrant program. Working with MSF isn't the kind of thing a medical student could do to pad his or her resume; applicants must have two years experience in their position and meet profession-specific requirements. Knowledge of French is helpful, as is other relevant work experiences abroad.
Applicants must also be willing to leave their lives behind for a minimum of nine to 12 months once they are assigned. Assignments are made based on field needs after a selective screening process. Only about 10 percent of a field mission's staff is composed of international professionals; the rest of the 27, workers providing services in the field are locals [source: MSF ]. If you don't have your M. According to the organization, 95 percent of its worldwide funding comes from private individuals.
Having independent funding is essential to MSF's mission; it allows them to remain neutral in conflicts as well as retain the right to speak out when necessary. MSF is famously strict on who they will or won't accept money from; for example, the organization won't accept donations from corporations that it views as antithetical to its mission [source: Strom ].
Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Something happened in Sierra Leone during the Ebola crisis that brought all of these issues to head.
The worst Ebola outbreak in history continues to rage in West Africa. And the chief doctor in the area has contracted the deadly disease.
He was one of the first doctors to treat Ebola patients in the country. When Ebola broke out, he trained hundreds of clinicians, including Kenny and many other national staff who later worked for MSF. He was kind of like Dr. Fauci of Ebola, one of the key leaders fighting the epidemic. He was kind of excited to do things and very decisive and he really wanted to do it, he really wanted to plunge in.
Dan Bausch is a doctor and a leading expert in global health. He worked alongside Dr. Khan in Sierra Leone. When Dan found out that Dr. They asked the World Health Organization to medevac Dr.
Khan out of Sierra Leone. That was routine for international medical staff. At first, the WHO said no. And by the time the organization agreed, it was too late. They also pushed MSF to give Dr. What they termed equity and social justice, that you had many, many people every day who were coming down with Ebola who were not getting offered an experimental therapeutic.
He says doctors make decisions about who should live and die all the time. To be very frank, if it was an MSF worker who had fallen sick, someone who had come into the country from outside-. A few days after Dr. It was used to treat two white American relief workers.
Both lived. Dan says that Dr. And we went to Kailahun to see how Kenny and other national staff are doing. A few miles outside of town, the paved road turns into gravel and we enter a jungle. Bushes and trees reach towards us from all sides. Kenny and some other former MSF staff show us around.
He points to where the ambulances and the Land Rovers would park. They know they helped to save many lives. But they also say they feel left behind and forgotten. At the end of the Ebola outbreak, national staff say they were finally invited to the guest house. They hoped after a year of grueling work with low pay MSF might reward them. Workers tell us they hope they might get a severance check. Instead, they say they were each given a certificate and a big white bucket, gloves, and soap.
He was a nurse who worked there and died of Ebola. Because dead bodies were highly infectious, everyone, except for Dr. Khan was buried in a cemetery down the road.
Today, there are rows and rows of big brown mounds and a few wooden placard. A lot of them have fallen down or cracked in half. So many Sierra Leonians from across the country died from Ebola and are buried here.
Kenny, Gloria and other former national staff tell us that MSF promised to pay into their social security program or NASAD, but the money never showed up in their accounts. We asked MSF about this several times, the organization did not answer those questions. We spent a lot of time trying to get to the bottom of this. When we come back Indira Govender is torn.
Potential savings will vary. Discounts vary and are not available in all states and situations. Reveal is a nonprofit news organization and we rely on support from listeners like you. Become a member by texting the word reveal to Standard data rates apply and you can text stop at any time. Again, text reveal to Thank you. Food, lodging, transportation, and daily spending money are also routinely provided. And sometimes Doctors Without Borders throws in cushy benefits like private school for kids.
But the issues the organization faces run much deeper than that. Doctors Without Borders acknowledges that bias, inequality, and institutional racism are problems they have to wrestle with. Indira Govender. At the beginning, it was her dream job, but Indira has grown disillusioned. She picks up the story from here. That experience was one of the most incredible experiences of my life.
That has not changed. But she also sees how local staff members felt disrespected, undervalued, and stuck in subservient roles. In the end she decides-. Mostly though she was ready to get on with her life. She got married, had kids. Indira got a research job that she loved, but she kept in touch with people who worked for Doctors Without Borders. And so it kept coming up. So I saw other people come through the organization and have the same experience and leave feeling disempowered.
It might just be Doctors Without Borders. In our investigation, we spoke to about a hundred current and former staff. From Ukraine, to Egypt, to Canada, the stories we heard were strikingly similar. And they got way fewer benefits. This is true in many of the 88 countries in which Doctors Without Borders works. In on average, MSF spent six times more on each expat than each local staffer. National staff we spoke to also say they routinely heard expats disparaging them.
In Egypt, employees say they heard expat colleagues use almost the exact same language Indira heard in South Africa years before. That local staff are lazy, that they just want money. One African staff member at a different site shared a report with us where he claimed his white colleagues referred to a fellow African staff as a chimpanzee, gorilla, and monkey.
Indira says these stories speak to a larger truth. The wellbeing of national staff are often seem to be secondary to the wellbeing of international staff. We learned of several instances of national staff being left behind in dangerous situations often with little or no warning. For example, when a conflict threatened to spill into part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one expat staffer told us that international staff were evacuated, overnight.
She said that national staff had no idea what was happening. They just woke up one morning and their colleagues were gone.
The staffer says she still thinks about it to this day. We are gathered here in order to raise our voice. We are workers of [inaudible] Afghanistan. In the video about two dozen men and women are seen protesting in Kabul, holding signs that say, our lives matter.
We asked Doctors Without Borders if they had plans to evacuate national staff. In a written statement given to us in early September, a spokesperson said, no. They are offering to provide national staff with certificates, proving they were employed with the organization and Doctors Without Borders said it is giving national staff accurate information about the possibilities for evacuation and other immigration pathways.
Doctors Without Borders stress that as of early September, it was still providing care at five sites in Afghanistan with some national staff and 50 expats.
Doctors Without Borders also told us it was negotiating with the Taliban and assured national staff they would be safe. In a written statement, the organization said that it bears specific responsibility towards staff who relocate to danger zones as part of their work with the group.
And I should add that Doctors Without borders is not alone here. Other organizations, including the UN have also been criticized for not doing enough to get local staff out of Afghanistan. And in the end, evacuations of Afghan nationals have proven extremely challenging and often impossible.
Indira and the majority of the people we spoke to say the underlying problem here is who gets to make decisions. They decide its priorities and assign staff to missions.
To begin addressing the problem, they say they opened an operational center in West Africa, but Doctors Without Borders has acknowledged these issues for almost 15 years. In , the organization pledged to give all staff fair opportunities. Over the next decade, it held meeting after meeting, issuing one mea culpa after another and pledging to do better. But more than a thousand former and current staffers have come out publicly to say nothing has changed.
Of course, we need to work towards delivering change faster. Bumicho is a physician from Kenya. And this is something that we need to actively and more robustly address. Sam was once a national staff member and was elected to the position several weeks before we spoke. Sam says Doctors Without Border staff have rightly highlighted the problems of structural racism within the organization for years.
And he says people must keep raising their voice to make change. I pushed him on this point. Where do we get this information?
We go out to the field. We need to speak to the people. But Sam, you have that information. I mean that information has come out for decades from thousands of people at this point.
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