Logistician

A report from the logistics team at MSF-USA.

MSF's logistical warehouse in France supplies programs around the world, often in less than one day.

"It was quite a rough journey, but the doctors and the nurses were fantastic. It was incredibly choppy; a lot of the patients were suffering from seasickness, and, at times, it was too rough to stand."

An MSF nurse describes training health workers to deal with the ongoing cholera outbreak in Haiti.

"Already, we’ve had reports of something like 25 to 30 villages that have been completely swamped by this water."

MSF's two facilities in Imey in the Somali region of Ehtiopia provides crucial health care services to people who would otherwise go without.

James Kambaki, MSF project coordinator in Balochistan province, reports on the situation and on MSF's activities.

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

We were very lucky because we found a dialysis center at General Hospital. It was broken down—there was no water, there was no electricity because of the earthquake. But with the MSF logisticians we could restart it in 36 hours.

Right now we still are struggling to treat patents in very rough conditions. The biggest problem is not having medical structures where we can treat them. But we have been able to find an open space big enough for the inflatable hospital that should arrive tomorrow. So we will have a 100-bed hospital with surgical capacity operation before the end of next week.

It is the only prison in Ituri, built for 100 or so prisoners, but housing five times more. The prison is dilapidated, but worse, until recently it has been a place where many prisoners die from hunger.

Today I went to the third, and final, place where we are doing medical clinics, in the area of Dakshin Bedkashi. You really have to watch out for high tide, because you can only pass through certain places at low tide. Otherwise, where the pathway is broken, you have to go up to your chest through water with strong currents.

It is my third day here in Satkira District of Bangladesh. About six weeks ago, this place was inundated with water when Cyclone Aila hit and broke many levees in a region where people live at or below sea level. The result was much like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

All these people had fled their villages in a hurry, and it was difficult for them to get health care because they couldn’t pay for it. That’s why it was so important for us to provide free medical consultations in both locations.

Despite ongoing conflict that has made it difficult for humanitarian organizations to be in Iraq, since 2006 Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has set up medical projects for populations in Anbar, Tameen, Ninewa, Sulemaniya, Baghdad, and Basra. MSF also runs a project in Jordan for Iraqi war wounded. Khalil Sayyad recently returned from Basra, southern Iraq, where he worked as Field Coordinator for nine months. He was part of MSF's first international team to establish a presence in Iraq since 2004, when high insecurity led MSF to leave country.

Following an outbreak in eastern Chad, MSF is currently vaccinating children between six months and 15 years against measles. As a nurse, Lenny Krommenhoek was part of this vaccination team for five weeks. Following her recent return, she wrote about the enormous logistical challenges she faced during her mission and her very personal experience in this remote part of the world.

When fighting erupted between armed groups and government forces in the North Kivu province of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in August 2007, it forced an estimated 10,000 Congolese to flee for safety over the border into Uganda.  Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) helped set up a transit site in Nyakabanda, situated about 10 miles from the DRC border in Uganda’s Kisoro district. Nurse Laura Cobey arrived to be field coordinator for the MSF project in October, just as a renewed surge in fighting pushed another wave of Congolese to seek refuge in Nyakabanda. Cobey describes the quick opening of the site and conditions for the estimated 13,000 people who lived there until its December closing.

Since the start of 2008, 767 people suffering from cholera have required treatment in a cholera treatment center (CTC) supported by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) the city of Lubumbashi, the capital of Katanga province and the economic center of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Luis Encinas, a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) emergency coordinator, is managing the intervention to provide care to those affected by the earthquake that hit Peru's southern coast on August 15. Three days after the disaster, MSF chartered a cargo plane, loaded it with 12 tons of relief materials, and flew into Peru. Encinas, who has been on the ground for a few days, gives an account of MSF activities.

Vanessa van Schoor worked for 13 months as Head of Mission for Doctors Without Borders'/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) project in Darfur, overseeing security, solving staff and supply issues, and balancing medical work with communication of the injustices witnessed by MSF teams. Here she talks about the risks that humanitarian aid workers face in Darfur and why the intense effort to help must continue.

Victor Garcia, former MSF Project coordinator in Norte de Santander department, Colombia

"The only thing separating the displaced people from life-threatening dehydration was a three-and-half inch diameter, exposed pipe that was snaking through the jungle to the town." says Barry Gutwein, a water-and-sanitation engineer from Indiana, who was dispatched to Dubie, a town in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Katanga Province.

In October 2005, tens of thousands of people throughout Central America lost their homes, livelihoods, and access to clean water when Tropical Storm Stan struck the region. Laurent Dedieu, Logistics Supervisor for MSF-USA, oversaw MSF's emergency assistance program in Guatemala's Chinquimulilla region, Santa Rosa department.

A French nurse and a Canadian logistician, volunteers with MSF, have just returned from nearly two months as a two-person team in the town of Mornay, located in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Diderik van Halsema, Project Coordinator in Kandahar, Afghanistan was forced to evacuate his team from southern Afghanistan in April, 2003, when increasing violence against foreigners made it impossible to stay.