Testimony

Elizabeth Ramlow, a midwife from Massachusetts, was seven months into a nine-month assignment with MSF in Luwingu, Zambia, when visa problems cut her time there short. Rather than returning home, however, she went to work in South Sudan’s Doro refugee camp in Maban, where an MSF emergency team had set up a clinic to care for tens of thousands of refugees fleeing conflict just over the border in Sudan.

Testimonies from Syrian patients and doctors point to a coordinated crackdown on the provision of urgent medical care for people wounded in the ongoing violence.

These testimonies from Somali refugees in southern Ethiopia describe the violence that drove them from their homes and the challenges they face in the refugee camps they've settled in. 

Testimonies given by people who were injured or whose family members were injured, killed, or adbucted during attacks in South Sudan's Jonglei State in December 2011 and January 2012.

This testimony from a 33-year-old refugee in the Doro camp in South Sudan describes the hardships he and his family have faced since arriving in the overcrowded camp.

Busiwe Beko who lives in Khayelitsha, South Africa, describes her baby daughter’s successful battle with drug-resistant TB.

Malnutrition is of the biggest dangers for the Lower Juba region's eight million people. In the town of Marere, MSF runs the only hospital in southern Somalia that offers free medical care.

A cholera epidemic has caused more than 250 deaths in western DRC as it spreads through villages and towns along the Congo River.

Real stories of people living with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. Today's feature from Swaziland: "I do get a lot of emotional support from my family, but financially we are struggling."

John*, 15, his brother Matthew*, 3, and their mother left Libya on a boat headed for Italy when the war began. They lost their mother when the boat capsized. 

Mouhaydin, 27, worked as a laborer and a cleaner in Libya before the war. He arrived at Shousha camp in March with his wife. She died on a boat to Europe in April. 

Abdul, 23, spent four months in a desert prison in Libya before escaping to Shousha camp on the Tunisian border. Fearing insecurity in Shousha, he says he is ready to go back to Libya.

MSF staff in Haiti speak about the catostrophic earthquake and how they first responded to the disaster.

In his memoir, Six Months in Sudan: A Young Doctor in a War-Torn Village, physician James Maskalyk recounts his first Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) assignment in Abyei, Southern Sudan. He and his team provided emergency medical care to the local population in this oil-rich region, which at the time was contentiously disputed. The book began as a popular MSF blog called Suddenly…Sudan.

Over the past four months, the Thai military has used heightened restrictions and coercive tactics to pressure some 4,700 ethnic Lao Hmong refugees, who claim to have fled violence and persecution in Laos, to renounce their claims for protection and accept a forced return to Laos.

Paul had received some money. He was supposed to share it with us. When my aunt, my brother and I went to see him, he said he had only received 20,000 francs and he would give us 1,000 francs each. We said that was not enough. He said he couldn’t give us any more than that and told us to come with him to the place where the money was.

I went to the shop to buy toilet paper for my uncle and I noticed a guy staring at me. Then he came over and asked my name. I didn’t want to tell him my real name, so I said it was ‘Junior’. He asked where I lived and invited me to come to his house.

I live in Khayelitsha, a large township on the outskirts of Cape Town. I grew up in Eastern Cape with my parents and four older brothers.

I came back from school, I had lunch and was getting ready to go out again. My father offered me 150 francs to come to the bedroom with him. I said I didn’t want to go. But then he took me over to the bed by force and did bad things to me.

I was walking down the street and as I passed this one house, a man took me by force, dragged me inside and raped me. I didn’t know him, I had never seen him before.

MSF recently published From Ethiopia to Chechnya: Reflections on Humanitarian Action, 1988-1999, a collection of essays from François Jean (1956-1999). “The Sudanese Conflict” is an excerpt from an interview Jean gave in 1993.

MSF nurse practitioner Deborah Van Dyke helped run a medical program in the remote village of Pibor. Here she describes the experiences that affected her the most.

Pediatrician Leo Ho worked in the intensive care unit of an MSF-run hospital in Bo, Sierra Leone, an area plagued by malaria. Here, he reflects on his assignment through images captured by photojournalist Francesco Zizola.