Médecins Sans Frontières: First In, Last Out

Written by Clare Byrne

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Young Canadian volunteers with Médicins Sans Frontières talk about braving some of the world's worst conflict zones to deliver help where it's desperately needed.

Imagine that a judge walks into a hospital ward, strides over to a gunshot victim, peels back his bandages and starts counting the patient's stitches. Ask him what he's doing and he tells you matter-of-factly that he's calculating what sentence to give the attacker. "There are quite a few stitches," he says, so he's leaning towards five years.

Sounds far-fetched doesn't it? But swap a village elder for the judge, and blood money for the prison sentence and you have a description of the type of justice system that Sharon Janzen has witnessed in rural Somalia.

Janzen is a 28-year-old nurse from British Columbia. She spent six months last year in Somalia working with one of the world's most respected NGOs: Médecins Sans Frontiers, or Doctors Without Borders.

There's not much talk about Somalia in the mass media these days, a fact that's more cause for concern than complacency. The murder of 18 U.S. soldiers by an angry mob in the capital, Mogadishu in 1993 made it a terra non grata for many NGOs and Somalia sort of fell off the international radar. But the country still has huge issues. For starters, Somalia hasn't had a proper central government since President Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991, and nine years of civil war left basic infrastructure in tatters.

"There are no hospitals, no universities, no law and no police," says Janzen. "There are just warlords and clan fighting. And the medical personnel have all left."

This is exactly the type of place you expect to find MSF. The organization looks after the health of people in areas of conflict or disaster where there is little or no medical infrastructure. It prides itself on usually being the first NGO in and last out.

Janzen was one of five international volunteers on a mission to set up a clinic in Somalia's south-central Dinsor province. Two of her co-workers were Kenyan, one was Swiss and the project coordinator was Canadian. Together they worked round the clock to tend to the health needs of a population of 100,000—some of whom travelled on foot for days to receive medical attention.

"In trauma, we would see two or three gunshot wounds a week," says Janzen. "We also saw a number of children who had limbs blasted off by grenades. Altogether, we had about 35 patients in intensive care, and between 50 to 100 people a day as outpatients."



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