Posts tagged south sudan

We are all exhausted. Most of us started the day tired after a long week and I wasn’t the only one planning a low-key weekend.

Worn out though we are, there are few complaints. This is what we are here for after all. And we would do it all again tomorrow if we had to.

It’s your birthday, you plan to relax, then the call comes in - there are many people wounded by gun shots down the river. Read how MSF nurse Emma and her team in South Sudan leap into action.  
Photo: MSF doctor Claire Marie Loys introduces a young patient to his heartbeat in Aweil, South Sudan. Photo by Yann Libessart/MSF Dr. Loys and her team provide maternal and child health at the Aweil referral hospital; over the last year more than 4,700 children have received treatment there.

Photo: MSF doctor Claire Marie Loys introduces a young patient to his heartbeat in Aweil, South Sudan. Photo by Yann Libessart/MSF

Dr. Loys and her team provide maternal and child health at the Aweil referral hospital; over the last year more than 4,700 children have received treatment there.

Photo: Destroyed medical supplies litter the ground outside the MSF hospital in Pibor. South Sudan 2013 © Vikki Stienen/MSF South Sudan: MSF Hospital Severely Damaged in Intentional Attack MSF strongly condemns the deliberate damage and looting of its hospital in Pibor town, in South Sudan’s Jonglei State, which has left tens of thousands of people without access to essential medical care. The hospital’s infrastructure was systematically damaged May 11–12 in order to render it unusable without major repairs. Therapeutic medical food and hospital beds were looted. The MSF structure is the only hospital facility for Pibor County, with the nearest alternative more than 90 miles away. The hospital’s closure leaves roughly 100,000 people cut off from health care. Many of them have fled to the bush amid conflict between the South Sudan Army (SPLA) and the David YauYau armed militia group. “A special effort was made to destroy drug supplies by strewing them on the ground, to cut and slash the warehouse tents, to ransack the hospital wards, and even to cut electricity cables and rip them from the walls,” said Richard Veerman, MSF operations coordinator for South Sudan.

Photo: Destroyed medical supplies litter the ground outside the MSF hospital in Pibor. South Sudan 2013 © Vikki Stienen/MSF

South Sudan: MSF Hospital Severely Damaged in Intentional Attack

MSF strongly condemns the deliberate damage and looting of its hospital in Pibor town, in South Sudan’s Jonglei State, which has left tens of thousands of people without access to essential medical care.

The hospital’s infrastructure was systematically damaged May 11–12 in order to render it unusable without major repairs. Therapeutic medical food and hospital beds were looted. The MSF structure is the only hospital facility for Pibor County, with the nearest alternative more than 90 miles away. The hospital’s closure leaves roughly 100,000 people cut off from health care. Many of them have fled to the bush amid conflict between the South Sudan Army (SPLA) and the David YauYau armed militia group.

“A special effort was made to destroy drug supplies by strewing them on the ground, to cut and slash the warehouse tents, to ransack the hospital wards, and even to cut electricity cables and rip them from the walls,” said Richard Veerman, MSF operations coordinator for South Sudan.

South Sudan: Preparing for the Rainy Season

At the Yida refugee camp in South Sudan, where the population has increased five-fold in the past year, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is treating growing numbers of patients and preparing for the additional hardships that will come with the approaching rainy season.

Photo: The MSF hospital and the Sobat river at dawn as seen from the river’s edge in Nasir. South Sudan 2012 © Brendan Bannon Field Blog: An Assortment of Oncalls Emma Pedley is a British nurse working on community outreach projects with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Nasir, South Sudan. Read her MSF Field Blog here. It’s hard to give an idea of the bewildering breadth of patients that we are presented with during on calls. Even used as I am to the variety of humanity that compiles the average emergency department back at home, I am still frequently taken aback with the range of problems that the radio calls that I receive during the night require me to somehow deal with. The only part of the hospital that I don’t cover during the night is maternity, so the scope of cases I am called for range from ER cases that need admission to malnourished children in the inpatient therapeutic feeding center ( ITFC) who can deteriorate with frightening suddenness during the night to unstable patients in the ICU… .

Photo: The MSF hospital and the Sobat river at dawn as seen from the river’s edge in Nasir. South Sudan 2012 © Brendan Bannon

Field Blog: An Assortment of Oncalls

Emma Pedley is a British nurse working on community outreach projects with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Nasir, South Sudan. Read her MSF Field Blog here.

It’s hard to give an idea of the bewildering breadth of patients that we are presented with during on calls. Even used as I am to the variety of humanity that compiles the average emergency department back at home, I am still frequently taken aback with the range of problems that the radio calls that I receive during the night require me to somehow deal with. The only part of the hospital that I don’t cover during the night is maternity, so the scope of cases I am called for range from ER cases that need admission to malnourished children in the inpatient therapeutic feeding center ( ITFC) who can deteriorate with frightening suddenness during the night to unstable patients in the ICU… .

2am “Oncall, oncall for ICU – we have one child yes, they are convulsions…” I jolt into wakefulness and am out of my bed and running over to the hospital as fast as I can go telling the nurses to prepare IV diazepam down the radio as I go. This could be anything, but always think worst case scenario… I arrive on the ward and yes, this is actual convulsions, a four-year-old with cerebral malaria.
MSF nurse Emma writes about the of variety people she treats when on-call in South Sudan. Please leave your comments for Emma on her blog. 
It’s incredible to watch how fast MSF responds in these evolving situations – the boat went out on Monday – and on Tuesday was sent back to the hospital containing seven patients, mostly women and children with gunshot wounds. A further five arrived the next day. I don’t think I’ve ever looked after a braver patient than the trembling mite of a five-year-old girl with the bullet wound to her shoulder who sat still and tense, holding back sobs while I examined her.
MSF nurse Emma’s latest blog post from Nasir, South Sudan. Please leave your questions and comments for Emma below her blog post.
Photo: People line up for registration at a vaccination site. South Sudan 2013 © Corinne Baker/MSF Preventing Cholera in South Sudan’s Remote Refugee Camps MSF teams have completed a preventive cholera vaccination campaign in and around the refugee camps in Maban County, South Sudan. Hoping to prevent the spread of the potentially fatal disease, staff vaccinated 105,000 refugees in four camps and 27,500 other residents of the area. MSF launched the vaccination campaign with the cooperation of South Sudan’s Ministry of Health as part of a cholera preparedness and prevention plan. While teams have already set up and pre-stocked cholera treatment facilities in the camps, the remoteness of the area and supply challenges mean that a cholera outbreak could be disastrous. That’s what makes the added prevention provided by a vaccination campaign so crucial. “The key for preventing cholera is to ensure sufficient access to clean drinking water, and to have appropriate sanitation and hygiene facilities,” says Paul Critchley, MSF emergency coordinator in Maban County. “We are currently tackling an escalating hepatitis E outbreak in the camps, so we know that sanitation conditions here are not yet adequate. Hepatitis E is spread in similar ways to cholera, and this reinforces the need to do all we can to prevent cholera breaking out too.”

Photo: People line up for registration at a vaccination site. South Sudan 2013 © Corinne Baker/MSF

Preventing Cholera in South Sudan’s Remote Refugee Camps

MSF teams have completed a preventive cholera vaccination campaign in and around the refugee camps in Maban County, South Sudan. Hoping to prevent the spread of the potentially fatal disease, staff vaccinated 105,000 refugees in four camps and 27,500 other residents of the area.

MSF launched the vaccination campaign with the cooperation of South Sudan’s Ministry of Health as part of a cholera preparedness and prevention plan. While teams have already set up and pre-stocked cholera treatment facilities in the camps, the remoteness of the area and supply challenges mean that a cholera outbreak could be disastrous. That’s what makes the added prevention provided by a vaccination campaign so crucial.

“The key for preventing cholera is to ensure sufficient access to clean drinking water, and to have appropriate sanitation and hygiene facilities,” says Paul Critchley, MSF emergency coordinator in Maban County. “We are currently tackling an escalating hepatitis E outbreak in the camps, so we know that sanitation conditions here are not yet adequate. Hepatitis E is spread in similar ways to cholera, and this reinforces the need to do all we can to prevent cholera breaking out too.”

Fighting Neglected Disease Sleeping Sickness in South Sudan

Sleeping sickness has been a major health problem in South Sudan for the last century. Transmitted by the tse tse fly, it can be fatal if left untreated. Over a ten-week period, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) mobile teams based in Kajo Keji traveled to remote villages where patients have little access to medical care, screening over 37,000 people for the disease and providing treatment to 

Many memories of South Sudan will remain with me forever. Sad memories of seeing first-hand the dire circumstances many people have to endure or of witnessing the death of a small child. Disturbing images like seeing a small boy play with an imitation AK47 possibly trying to mimic his father or other men. But mostly happy memories of seeing a mother’s joy when her child gets better, the appreciation of our staff for training and coaching given, the surprise on people’s faces when I talked to them in my few words of Nuer, of working together with the rest of the team and of the beautiful sunsets.
MSF general practitioner, Cormac, reflects on his time in South Sudan as his first project with MSF comes to an end.
Nick Lawson, MSF-USA’s Director of Field Human Resources, on how MSF finds people to work with.

Nick Lawson, MSF-USA’s Director of Field Human Resources, on how MSF finds people to work with.

This strange, inhospitable, impossible place that is now home for 15,000, 65,000, 115,000 people who had to run here.

I don’t think about this a lot, because it seems like an impossible thought. To try to understand what it might feel like to have no home to go to anymore. The Ingessana are of their place, very much so. I can’t see it in the faces or the eyes of the people who I work with here, the people on my team who come from the refugee population. Strangely, they seem happy, in such good spirits. I’m confused by a lot of my staff actually. If I was bombed out of my home, I would be shit mad, totally crushed.

Imran takes a philosophical look at humanitarian life: what it means to be constantly on the move and away from home. Please leave your comments and questions for Imran in the comments box below his blog post. 

MSF Monitors the Situation in Yida Camp, South Sudan

The end of the rainy season and continued conflict have pushed a new wave of people to Yida refugee camp in South Sudan. The high mortality rate in July has stabilized, but levels of malnutrition among displaced children remain high.

The combination stressors of unfamiliar climate and diet, not to mention the ideals that lead you into this sort of work in the first place make a lot of people push themselves hard at their jobs – unsurprisingly illness and periods of emotional burnout are not uncommon among the expat workers… only time will tell how I fare. For now I’m going to follow the advice that I’ve been given and hope and pray that my immune system holds up!

“Hello, Emma? Welcome to Nasir, paradise!”

Meet British nurse Emma who has just started her first MSF mission in South Sudan, working with outpatients, childhood immunization and community outreach programs. Please leave your questions and comments for Emma below her blog post. 
Photo: Sudanese refugees wait in line in the outpatient department at the MSF field hospital in Jamam refugee camp. South Sudan 2012 © Paula Bronstein/Getty Images Fear and Hope in South Sudan as Refugees Start to Cross Border Again More than 170,000 people who fled violence in Sudan are living in refugee camps in South Sudan. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been assisting the refugees since November 2011, running field hospitals and providing supplies of clean drinking water and oral rehydration fluids. Now that the floods caused by the rainy season are subsiding refugees are starting to cross the border again. In December 2012, around 370 refugees arrived at the border village of El Fuj, traveling in two groups and arriving a few days apart. This is a small number compared to last year, when 35,000 people crossed the border in the space of just three weeks. Time will tell if the numbers will increase. While the camps in South Sudan provide relative safety, refugees living there face dire conditions. There are still shortages of clean water—at times, 40 percent of medical consultations carried out by MSF were related to diarrhea—and there are ongoing occurrences of Hepatitis E. In Batil Camp (which hosts around 35,000 refugees), mortality rates were more than double emergency thresholds in summer 2012, and more than a quarter of the children under the age of five were malnourished. Since September 2012, conditions have improved in many areas and mortality rates have dropped, but nutrition and food security are still serious concerns.

Photo: Sudanese refugees wait in line in the outpatient department at the MSF field hospital in Jamam refugee camp. South Sudan 2012 © Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Fear and Hope in South Sudan as Refugees Start to Cross Border Again

More than 170,000 people who fled violence in Sudan are living in refugee camps in South Sudan. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been assisting the refugees since November 2011, running field hospitals and providing supplies of clean drinking water and oral rehydration fluids. Now that the floods caused by the rainy season are subsiding refugees are starting to cross the border again. In December 2012, around 370 refugees arrived at the border village of El Fuj, traveling in two groups and arriving a few days apart. This is a small number compared to last year, when 35,000 people crossed the border in the space of just three weeks. Time will tell if the numbers will increase. While the camps in South Sudan provide relative safety, refugees living there face dire conditions. There are still shortages of clean water—at times, 40 percent of medical consultations carried out by MSF were related to diarrhea—and there are ongoing occurrences of Hepatitis E. In Batil Camp (which hosts around 35,000 refugees), mortality rates were more than double emergency thresholds in summer 2012, and more than a quarter of the children under the age of five were malnourished. Since September 2012, conditions have improved in many areas and mortality rates have dropped, but nutrition and food security are still serious concerns.