“It’s Really a Delicate Balance”: An MSF Doctor in the Jamam Refugee Camp

Dr. Kirrily de Polnay is working with Doctors Without Borders in the Jamam camp in an isolated region of South Sudan, where thousands of refugees from Sudan’s Blue Nile State are currently seeking sanctuary and the coming rainy season threatens to make delivering humanitarian aid even more challenging than it is now. Here, she talks about the situation in Jamam:

“We have so many cases of diarrhea and you’re trying to explain to them how to make the ORS [Oral Rehydration Solution] and they don’t have anything to make it in. Even I can find it hard to judge exactly half a sachet, and you tell them, "whatever you do you must drink water, you must drink the ORS we give you.” And they nod and say yes, but you know that they do not have enough water to really do that. They’ve only got a few liters a day. So what we are prescribing, they don’t have. And so you feel like you are trying to put a tiny plaster on a big hemorrhage.“

Photo:South Sudan 2012 © Robin Meldrum/MSF
MSF doctor Kirrily de Polnay treating a child in the ‘emergency room’ of MSF’s clinic in Jamam refugee camp.