Posted on 19 February, 2012
Somali Survivor Seeks to Give Back
Civil war destroyed Hussein Magale’s home in Somalia in 1992, when he was around two years old. Forced to flee, he spent the next 16 years in a Kenyan refugee camp.
“I was born in Somalia, raised up in Kenya, now I’m switching over to being an American,” he said.
“(People) live in an open prison, far away from justice and humanity,” Magale said. “They speak, but their voices are never heard.”
Doctors Without Borders eventually came to his camp. So Magale, who speaks three languages, began translating for them.“If they (doctors) were not like that, I wouldn’t have survived,” he said. “Working with them … I understood the power of a medical education.”
Now, he’s a biochemistry sophomore and an aspiring doctor. He translates for the University of Arizona Medical Center’s doctors and assists the Arizona Refugee Connection, which helps people worldwide.
He still has a lot of work ahead of him and medical school is some time away, but his goals for the future are very clear. “When I become a doctor,” he said, ”I’m planning to not only help Somalia or Somali refugees, but anyone who needs it most.”
Learn more on the work of Doctors Without Borders with Somali Refugees.
MSF Blogs: The Silent Cost of Child Malnutrition in DRC
Just as I was about to leave for the day, Steve, one of the nurses, asked me if I could see this one case before going. Beatrice (not her real name) was two years and seven months old when she arrived in our pediatric hospital tent in Kimbi Lulenge, South Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). A quick glance at the prostrate child in the dim circle of light cast by the tent’s single bulb and I guessed she was another malaria case. Steve shook his head. “Non, docteur. C'est un nouveau cas de malnutrition” (“No, doctor. This is a new malnutrition case”).
I quickly felt the child’s feet—icy cold. A careful look at Beatrice showed that all the curves and dimples of a healthy child’s face had shrunk, leaving the forbidding lines of a woodblock print. Beatrice was alert, but silent, which formed an ominous void amid the children crying in the rest of the tent. There was a glint of anxiety in her rheumy eyes that grew dimmer as she seemed to fall into it.
I gently pulled back the cotton wrap. The malnutrition had ravaged her skin, causing it to flake off, leaving behind weeping sores across her arms, legs and chest. There was no healthy protest when a drip was placed in her arm.
The nursing staff went into action. They gave her glucose to prevent low blood sugar, antibiotics through the drip to fight off infection; they advised her mother to keep her warm, as hypothermia takes the lives of many of these children at night. Careful fluid management and gentle refeeding was started: give too little and the child will succumb to dehydration and shock; too much and the child will die of heart failure.
Treating a malnourished child is complex. It is not simply a matter of doling out cups of milk and packets of peanut paste when a child like Beatrice finds her way into our tent, tied to her mother’s back after she has walked a day to get to our hospital or, if she’s lucky, on the back of a relative’s motorbike along the treacherous dirt roads.