Posts tagged Ivory Coast
Men assist a girl disembarking at a transit camp in Liberia for people from the Ivory Coast who fled post-election violence in their homeland and sought sanctuary across the border, where MSF worked to provide medical care. See more of The Year in Pictures 2011.
Photo: Liberia © Gaël Turine
Wracked by violence earlier in 2011, the western Ivory Coast town of Duekoué is struggling to return to normal. In this key cocoa-producing area, post-election violence was intensified by inter-communal tensions and land rivalries. Since January, thousands of people have sought refuge in displaced persons camps and a Catholic mission has provided shelter for up to 32,000 people. Now the Ivorian government has ordered the camps to close. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is working in Duekoué.
In Abidjan, Ivory Coast, MSF is treating patients wounded in ongoing fighting and addressing a backlog of medical emergencies that accumulated during the conflict earlier this year. See a slideshow here: http://bit.ly/kT4zVS
Photo: Ivory Coast 2011 © Nicola Vigilanti
Abidjan, Ivory Coast – April 18th, 2011
A surgical team performs a c-section during a power cut in Abobo Sud Hospital in Abidjan. A week after the end of the military standoff in Abidjan, very few hospitals are open, and Abobo Sud has been handling thirty deliveries daily. MSF has been supporting Abobo Sud Hospital since the end of February. At the peak of post-election violence, MSF was treating 25-30 conflict-related wounded every day from mid-March to 11th April.
Photo: Ivory Coast 2011 © Peter DiCampo/Pulitzer Center
We left the village on February 28. We spent two weeks in the brush and then walked for 10 days to get here, to Guiglo. We came with the entire family, 28 people.
Honorine, who left her home near Toulepleu, Ivory Coast due to on going fighting.
MSF opened a clinic in early January in the Duekoué camp and between January and April, they held more than 13,300 general medical visits. Serious cases, such as children with severe anemia with malaria, are sent to the Duekoué general hospital, where MSF reopened the operating room and the pediatric and maternity units.
Ivory Coast: The Fear Remains
MSF teams are working throughout the country, dealing with the consequences of months of post-election violence. The health system in Abidjan remains severely compromised; few hospitals have reopened to care for the thousands of people who’d been too terrified to seek health care earlier. The situation is equally precarious in the west of the country, where tens of thousands of displaced people continue to face uncertain circumstances.
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reports on projects in Libya, Ivory Coast, and Haiti, and on its work treating and advocating for people living with HIV/AIDS.
In the west of the country, the situation remains extremely tense as many villages remain empty and people continue to hide in the bush.
While the post-election violence that wracked Ivory Coast began to subside almost a month ago, emergency medical needs remain at critical levels. In Abidjan, health centers and hospitals are overwhelmed with patients—including newly wounded ones—and medical and drug supplies in the city are still dangerously low. In the west of the country, the situation remains extremely tense as many villages remain empty and people continue to hide in the bush. While some Ivoirians are beginning to return to their homes to try and resume their lives, more than 100,000 remain in Liberia and thousands more are in overcrowded camps in western Ivory Coast.
During a week of intense violence that preceded the arrest of former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo on April 11, an MSF team working at the Abobo Sud Hospital in northern Abidjan was isolated and unable to obtain additional supplies from the outside. Delphine Chedorge, coordinator of the MSF team in Abobo Sud, kept a diary in which she describes the teams’ daily life during this tense period. Some information and facts have been changed or deleted in the interest of security, confidentiality, and comprehension, but the essence of her diary is presented here.
Photo: Ivory Coast 2011 © Peter DiCampo/Pulitzer Center
My home has been destroyed, and there is nothing left of the contents. The situation is very urgent. Human beings are dying.
Full Video.
These people are still terrified, so they wait until their condition is critical to seek medical care. The displaced people are too afraid to return to their homes in case the violence is not yet over.
The man caught me. He said he was going to kill me. I begged him not to, but he would not listen. He said “I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill you with my machete.
Full Video.
In western Ivory Coast, many people who have fled brutal violence do not dare to return home. Some 28,000 people have taken refugee in a camp while others are living outside in the bush. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) staff are working in the camp and also running mobile clinics to places where displaced people are sheltering.
(Source: doctorswithoutborders.org)
Ivory Coast
A young girl is helped by her mother at MSF-supported Bangolo Hospital. Her foot had to be amputated after it was too badly damaged by bullets to be saved. She was fleeing the fighting in her village when she was shot.
Learn more:
“Wounded Patients Are Stable, But Their Problems Are Not Over”
Photo: Ivory Coast 2011 © Peter DiCampo
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Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international medical humanitarian organization working in more than 60 countries to assist people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
