Category: Relief Work

Twice now, we’ve gotten huge numbers of injured people from vehicle accidents. Things are difficult in a hospital made of poles and plastic sheeting in the best of times, but with an influx of 15 to 20 injured people at night, it can get ugly fast. Luckily Emir (our doctor) is really good at handling…

Today we had a little excitement in the compound. The storekeeper came to me really agitated. He said that he’d gone in the food store to check that things were ready to deliver food on Monday. But when he opened the door he found a big snake. He showed me that it was as big…

The TFC is the Therapeutic Feeding Center, where severely malnourished patients can be fattened up. This is significantly harder than it sounds since it turns out that human bodies do not take well to severe starvation. As you put in fluids and carbohydrates, the body needs to adjust and deal with the new chemical balances.…

Hello from the middle of a huge rainstorm. It has been threatening to rain all day, and getting muggier and muggier, so it is nice that the rain and the cool breezes have finally come. It means, of course, that when I am done writing this and try to send it, it will fail because…

I have been quite busy here recently and my energy level is flagging because a Sunday that was supposed to be restful ended having several fire drills in it, so the whole team pretty much missed a day of rest. We have 4 guests here right now from Swiss Development Corporation, so they take a…

I haven’t mentioned the weather here much yet, but today weather dominated my activities, so I have it on the mind. When I first got to Monrovia a month and a half ago, I was welcomed back to the tropics by the heat and humidity I had become used to in the Peten, in northeastern…

The rules say you aren’t supposed to have any pets in the expat house so that there’s no problem with allergies or fleas. But rules were meant to be broken. Our compound has: one dog, one cat, one hen with three Guinea fowl chicks as big as it, another hen with 9 chicks, 2 roosters…

I got lots of stuff done on my “day off” yesterday due to the Liberian Independence Day. The threat of unrest on a national holiday meant that we were confined to the compound all day while the staff had the day off. Even though I had a day off to catch up, I had a…

I sat down to do my Sunday blog posting at about 10 pm but was immediately interrupted by our night watchman. He came to me to tell me that the hospital staff had an UNMIL (UN Mission in Liberia) vehicle there asking MSF staff to go with them out into the night to fetch an…

I figured I should give people an idea what exactly a logistician does. The glib answer is that we do everything the medical team either cannot or do not want to do. But actually in this project, at this time, it is a combination of upper management (meetings and signatures on slips of paper) and…