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Did you ever fear for you personal safety?
I never felt that I was in immediate danger. A big part of that was the precautions that were in place. We had a curfew and a watchman and were not allowed out of the compound after dusk. We didn’t drive cars, we didn’t carry guns, and we were always in radio communication with someone else no matter where we were.
How were you viewed as a Westerner/American by the Sudanese?
The populations that we were helping were amazingly pro-American, considering the state of world affairs. The people were very happy that we were there. It was an international team, primarily French but also some Australians and Italians. I was the only American. There were never any problems and we formed close working relations with the local staff.
Did you feel that you made a difference during your time in El Geneina?
Yes, I like to think so; at least in the lives of particular patients and their families. It is difficult when you start to think about the big picture and how much of a difference one makes. That is the wonderful thing about being a physician: when a patient comes in who is very sick, you treat them, and if things go well, they get better and go home. There was a ten-year-old we took care of who had severe dysentery for ten days. She was essentially comatose from the dehydration. With IV fluids, antibiotics, and some support, she was conscious again in a couple of days, and after a week was basically herself again, a happy ten-year-old girl. Those sorts of images stay with you.
What are the current needs of the people in Darfur and what do you predict for the future?
It has been ten months since I’ve been there and my sense is that not much is different on a field level than when I was there. It is amazing that the same 1.2 to 1.4 million people are still living in refugee-style tent camps, still without consistent access to good food and water, and still without good shelter and medical care. It doesn’t make any sense. What makes sense is to make it safe for them to go back to their villages from where they came and to resume the lives they had before this madness started. There has to be a genuine commitment on the part of the government to make that happen. This will only happen by disarming the Janjaweed. It doesn’t seem that this is likely to occur spontaneously. There will have to be some outside political pressure, of which, to date, we’ve seen very little. On the contrary, I have heard reports that some members of the UN Security Council still supply arms to Khartoum [the central government], and that those arms are used against IDPs.
Thank you for sharing your experience with us. Any final thoughts you would like to include?
With groups like MSF, it is really only a small international staff working in conjunction with a very large number of local staff. We had less than ten international staff working with probably fifty or sixty local staff. We all enjoyed a nice working relationship and shared a sense of gratification in working toward a common cause that was of very immediate concern to the Sudanese. The program is not designed for sustainability, but when you hire sixty local people and some of them learn to be nutritionists and nurses and drivers and cooks and cleaners, you hope that some of that stays on after you go.
Jessica Kattan is a student at Yale Medical School