Msf

After an extended downtime due to lack of give-a-shit on my part, my blog is back, and I am back to blogging. Expect something here daily, which is my goal. Lots and lots of news… where to start? I suppose at the last post. Since then, Marina and I were evacuated from Chad due to fighting in the town where our project was located. We then found a nice little meningitis emergency in DR Congo. When we came home we had a little vacation, then I went to the USA to see family after close to a year away. We found separate postings with MSF for the summer, which was hard but worthwhile. Marina worked in Myanmar doing mobile clinics from boats, and I went to Oromyia, Ethiopia to participate in an nutritional emergency intervention. ...

MSF has a culture of civil (and not so civil) disagreement among it’s volunteers, executives, sections, field offices, and so on. To me, this shows that it is a vibrant community of passionate people. The only times in my career when I’ve really gotten angry about something was when I cared enough to fight for it. Because the actors in the mini-dramas of MSF are widely dispersed, they seem to have developed a habit of using written communication to fight their battles. I suppose written communication is the most amenable to translation, too. It’s great for observers like me, because it means that if you can get your hands on the what the organization is saying among itself, you can see how it works, even as an outsider. Try that with Microsoft! ...

I might have just gone too far in my quest to learn ever more about MSF. I came across this article (107 kb PDF). It has interesting details about the internal struggles in MSF’s history and in it’s current operations. Some interesting things: MSF-Belgium was created as a separate legal entity with MSF-France’s blessing. Quickly MSF-Belgium’s differing interpretation of the mission angered MSF-France, so much so that MSF-France attempted to strip MSF-Belgium of the MSF name in 1985. They failed. The 5 current operational sections used to be 6: MSF-Greece was created to be operational. However, in 1999 MSF-Greece was expelled from the MSF movement over its stance on intervention in Kosovo. It has been reintegrated into the MSF movement as of early 2005, but its operations are now done under the authority of MSF-Spain. Government funding dropped from 50% in 1999 to 20% in 2003. That was due to the increased private-donor fundraising power of the new sections (Australia, Japan, USA, etc). MSF-France relies on MSF-USA for close to 40% of it’s operational funds. MSF-Holland has only 20% Dutch citizens in the field. They rely on other sections to make up the other 80%. Internal controls meant to ensure external communications are consistent and do not jeopardize any operations are sometimes (perhaps routinely?) ignored in order to prevent the consultation and coordination process from watering down the message. None of that really changes my desire to work for MSF, but it does explain where some of the friction I’ve heard returned volunteers talk about comes from. One volunteer told me that it’s not true that MSF doesn’t play well with other NGO’s. But he went on to say that MSF-X is more likely to work with Oxfam or GOAL than to cooperate peacefully with MSF-Y! (Take that with a grain of salt, of course…) ...