Stories without borders

MARIA CHIARA

ELDA, Vascular Surgeon, Vice President of MSF

But from where does she get all this energy?!?

She could be my grandmother. Except my grandmother is

probably watching TV right now, while she drags me to a vascular

surgery conference in Sicily. And I struggle to keep up with her.

She’s the vice president of Doctors Without Borders and she’s also my vascular surgery professor. She’s, my idol.

I ask her: “Professor, when you specialized, how many women were in your class?”

She replies: “I was the only one then. The professor’s assistant asked me every single day: ‘What are you still doing here?’ A woman’s place is in Pediatrics! I stayed in Surgery mainly to spite him.

Although I couldn’t start humanitarian missions right away. I had to wait until I was fifty to go to Burundi, because they told me that if I wanted to pursue a career in academia, I had to abandon the crazy idea of ​​going to operate in dangerous places.

“Professor, I’d like to work in humanitarian missions too! But my boyfriend doesn’t want me to. He says it’s dangerous and that if I want to start a family, I have to get these ideas out of my head.”

The teacher stops abruptly and stands in front of me: ” So you dump him! You shouldn’t be with someone who doesn’t

let you have a professional and human experience that you consider important.

To pursue demanding professions, the only two requirements are to want it strongly and to fall in love with a person who doesn’t stand in our way. Falling in love passes sooner or later, and if it doesn’t transform into something deeper, the relationship is ruined. And if the partner is convinced that the woman must cook the pasta, he should be dumped immediately. Being with an intelligent person is a fundamental requirement. Period!

My dear friends, working for MSF is a heart-warming experience!

In parts of the world where healthcare is still a luxury freserved orreserved for the rich, we treat everyone free of charge, and this is a true revolution. When we pronounce the Hippocratic Oath, we doctors commit to treating every patient with equal care and commitment, regardless of ethnicity, religion, nationality, social status, and political ideology.

At MSF, minimum standards of care are always guaranteed.  Can you believe that in the event of a natural disaster, our logisticians are able to set up a hospital in forty-eight hours, with everything needed to perform two or three days of surgery. But what really amazes me  is the inflatable hospital! Have you ever seen inflatables for children? Well, the principle is the same. You lay a special cover on the ground, place the inflatable structure on top, plug in the generator, and voila! In a quarter of an hour, you have a tiny hospital made up of a series of pneumatic tents equipped with all the necessary facilities and completely self-sufficient in terms of energy and water!

But do you know what I’d like to be able to introduce into MSF today if I had a magic wand? I wish the final-year medical students could already work with MSF, at least in the less dangerous contexts. Working in a context with limited resources forces doctors to rely on what they have studied, but above all they must rely on their own hands and eyes. Testing yourself with MSF when you’re still a trainee would make you a different doctor for life. I’m convinced of that.”

So says Elda.

The flight crew invites us to turn off our phones. I take out my smartphone, select the chat with my boyfriend, and type quickly, before changing my mind: “Marco, I’m leaving for a humanitarian mission. It’s important to me, and therefore to us, if you care about me. We’ll talk about it as soon as I get home. But I won’t change my mind.” I add three hearts, send, and this time I really turn it off.

 

ALESSIA

Candida, 38, communications manager

Sitting in front of the gate, two elderly people, a man and a woman, look around fearfully. They’ve packed their clothes in one trolley, and sweets from Catania for their grandchildren in the other. They’re going to Milan to visit their son and his family.

A group of young people with piercings and tattoos passes in front of them. The man in the couple reflects: “Our son has never had a tattoo; he’s a very serious guy, he only thinks about work and family. May the Lord bless him. “His wife, upon hearing the name of the Lord, immediately makes the sign of the cross. “Every generation has its own fashion.”

“But here it’s not about fashion, it’s about decency. Here the men look like women, and the women look like men. I don’t understand anything anymore. Aliens, that’s what they are.”

A woman sits down in the empty seat next to them. She’s talking on the phone, all excited. Finally, she ends the call. “Goddamn motherfucking shit.” You don’t need an English-to-Italian translator to understand that it’s a string of profanities. Then she turns to the two elderly people in Italian: “Sorry to bother you with my call. But did you know that right now in Chad there’s an unprecedented humanitarian crisis affecting at least three hundred thousand people?” “Of course you don’t know! No one knows, because journalists don’t publish the news I send!

Chad is an east African country, on the border with Sudan and Darfur, has a refugee camp that…” The man in the couple interrupt her perplexed: “Excuse me, miss, but weren’t the Darfurs candies?”

“No, those are the Dufours!”

“Anyway, in this refugee camp, there are thousands of people who only have a few tents, you understand. Recently, I met a young man from Darfur who lived there with his wife and a small child. Two years earlier, the guerrillas had burned the village next to his, and he and his nine months pregnant wife had to flee. They couldn’t wait for the birth: staying there meant certain death. They walked all day and at night they stopped in an abandoned village. They entered a hut and settled on the ground. During the night, however, she went into labor. They were alone, inexperienced, in a deserted village. He didn’t know how to help her, so he ran by the starlight to the nearest village to find a midwife.

At dawn, his wife, helped by the woman, gave birth to little Ali.”

 

“Oh Lord, exactly like Mary and Joseph,” the woman comments.

“Exactly, but more than two thousand years later!

They stopped for two days in that abandoned hut so that she could regain her energies and then set off again, managing to cross the border and reach the refugee camp. Now they survive, thanks to humanitarian aid, in a sort of tent built with branches and cloth. Their child isn’t registered at the registry office, he’s not included in the statistics, you see. Ali is a child who doesn’t exist! And he doesn’t exist because the media don’t want to publish the news of this humanitarian emergency, damn them!”

“Are you a war journalist?” the lady asks her

“Well, sort of. I studied Communication and International Cooperation because I wanted to be a journalist. Then, at the beginning of 2014, I left with a humanitarian organization for South Sudan, where a conflict had just broken out. When I arrived at the refugee camp, I realized that there was nothing. I’m someone who can talk even to walls, yet for two days I couldn’t find the words.

I thought:” Yesterday I was in Rome choosing which balm to bring along, and today I’m in a camp surrounded by people who have absolutely nothing, with thousands of corps piled up outside waiting to be buried.” Everything I had studied, all the fantastic things I had been imagining so far and all the words I had been learning since I was born were swept away in an instant.

On the third day, it felt like a click inside me, and I realized that I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing what I really wanted to do: bear witness. It’s a job. Hard, but extraordinary, I assure you. Then I managed to join MSF, and now here I am. I do two things for MSF: I research the political and social situation in the countries where we have missions, so I can share useful information with those who work there. And then I share with the media news about what we do because, we often reach places others will never reach, and if we don’t talk about it, nobody does. We are the voice of those who don’t have one.”

“But are you free to speak in every country in the world, even those who are ruled by dictatorship?” asks the man of the couple.

“Unfortunately, in some countries it’s more difficult: there’s a risk that projects will be blocked, and they will take revenge on our local staff. In those cases, we must carefully evaluate what to do: on one hand, we feel a strong need to testify, on the other, there’s the will to continue treating people and protecting our workers.”

The phone rings, she smiles at the two people and walks away to answer it.

“Anto,” says the wife, “as soon as we get back to Catania, you must go to the bank right away because we must donate to this organization. Do you understand?”

The husband sighs and says, “There, now we’re also making donations to aliens.”

The wife turns around, furious, only to realize that her husband is mocking her: “Of course I’m going to the bank; that woman deafened me with the sheer quantity of her words but, she is a good person .”

 

 

ISABELLA

“Right, so we’ll talk on Friday at 10 for the interview.

My CV in a nutshell? Look, it’s impossible to sum it up in a nutshell. I’ll send it to you by e-mail, okay? Sorry, but I really have to go now.”

In a nutshell, well, in a nutshell I could be described as: Maria Cristina, anthropologist for Médecins Sans Frontiers, 62 years old.

But that would be reductive. It would be like cutting out parts of my life that make her the person I am today.

It’s true, I now work for Médecins Sans Frontières, but I joined the organization after fifty adventurous years I had up to 2010, when I applied to work with them. Until then, I had worked first as a fashion designer, then as a creative costume designer, travelled to Mexico and finally decided to live there. After that, I studied anthropology, researched on Mayan designs and fabrics, and published books and articles. Finally, I returned to Italy and got an interest in medical anthropology, that studies the relationship between territory and health, illness and death.

Hence Médecins Sans Frontières.

“How can you sum up who we really are in a few words? How can you explain that I love emergencies situations in which my anthropologist’s eye can quickly see and assess aspects that others do not perceive?”

The first mission was three months in Guatemala.

Then the Ebola epidemic broke out in Guinea; the virus caused a very high mortality rate hence living conditions were extremely harsh.

The MSF Ebola center was called Centre d’isolation, but the word “isolation” was not translatable into the local language. Finding a new name was therefore very important, so it was called Treatment Centre even though, in that initial stage, out of every hundred people who entered, only five managed to recover.

No one knew what was happening in the hospital, but one thing was certain: there, people were dying. The fact that people were also dying outside seemed an irrelevant detail.

I racked my brain for days to figure out how to communicate to the outside world what was happening inside the treatment Center.  In the end I decided, in agreement with the rest of the team, to call a local video maker to record the life in the facility.

The video showed how patients were treated and the professionalism of the staff and collected witnesses from those who had recovered and from their relatives. The video was then entrusted to the few patients who had survived the virus.

Showing the videos in the villages gave also the opportunity to explain the mechanisms through which the virus spreads

“If a white woman like me, working in a weird hospital where patients were dying instead of recovering, had try to explain the same notion she would never have achieved the same result.”

I returned to Guinea a second time, and then a third, and at that point my colleagues from human resources forced me to stop. It seemed like an unfair decision at the time, but then I realized it was the right one because you can’t live in a state of emergency for too long, otherwise you get sucked into an unnatural vortex where extreme caution to avoid infection becomes your second nature.

“Usually, it’s only when I go back home that I really realize on how much danger I have been through and I exhausted I am. Departures are easy, stays pass, but returns are very difficult.”

Every MSF worker has their own obsessions; mine is to find out who is the health decision maker in every place where I work.

Keep thinking that the village chiefs or the elderlies are always the ones who can ultimately decide about health issues is a romantic and vaguely colonial legacy. Do you know, for instance, who in Congo, really helps shaping public opinion on health issues? It’s the very young people who know French and are therefore able to access information outside the village.

That’s why, when II was there, I proposed what at first sight looked a true bizarre idea but surprisingly enough was immediately approved by my colleagues. Together with a young local rapper, I wrote a catchy song with a wild rhythm, which contained a summary of the information that Médecins Sans Frontières wanted to convey about the virus.

In a very short time, everyone in the surrounding villages was dancing and singing the same song.

“This is why I love Médecins Sans Frontières so much: for its neutrality, which it maintains thanks to its financial independence, for its free healthcare, for its willingness to give a voice to those who do not have one but also because it accepts the bizarre creativity of an eccentric anthropologist like me!

 

NICOLE

Mirella, 40 years old, psychologist

I check my watch. I still have some time before my partner’s flight lands. This time we weren’t able to set off on the same mission, and  we got into different world places. But at least we’re back on the same day. It will be wonderful and strange to meet again, to talk about two different realities: Palestine and  Congo. We’ll have to let memories, emotions, and encounters settle, and reconnect with our home and our life together. “Hey!” I say to a woman who has violently bumped into me, but she keeps on speaking  to her friend and doesn’t even apologize. “I don’t understand teenagers nowadays! They’re aliens!” I hear her say angrily as they walk away. “But do you really listen to teenagers?” I’d like to ask her.
As a psychologist, I do believe this is the point: we don’t listen to them anymore. Technology has brought about significant changes in relationships, but I still find the essential traits of adolescents and their deep emotions wherever I work as an MSF psychologist. Nowadays young people are less confident than they were thirty years ago: they perceive the future as dramatic and chaotic. They are overwhelmed with information and images: they just see much but they don’t get engaged. Sharing their opinions, however,  is a primary need of adolescents, anywhere in the world. And so I would ask that woman: “Are you providing  space,  time, and a safe place to those you call Martians so that they can open up and talk about themselves?” She should have met Louis, in Haiti. The people there have long been experiencing a tragic urban warfare between gangs, who recruit kids as soon as they can hold a gun. MSF has a project for internally displaced people who flee their homes and seek refuge in safe places: sports fields, gyms, schoolyards. Louis was a strong-willed boy with leadership attitudes. He readily offered to help us gather the children and get them involved in our activities.
When we began talking to them about their dreams and fears, Louis claimed he wanted to become the local guerrilla leader to get power and thus a safe life. He could not figure out either the personal risk of being killed or the social risk of keeping alive a harmful model: he was just pursuing his dream of personal fulfillment. Apparently a bit cocky, he continued to take part in our workshops and one day he told us he had changed his mind about his future: he no longer wanted to become a gang leader, but he wanted to work for MSF. He told us he did want to help other children find a safe space to play and grow up, just as he had experienced there with us.
“We receive a lot of practical help such as clothes, notebooks, food, but it’s still difficult to find a space for ourselves,” he told us. He meant a safe place where they could be listened to, where they could think about their own weaknesses and emotions. That’s the reason why I work for MSF: because it’s an organization that, even in situations of extreme humanitarian emergency conditions, never loses sight of psychological needs and ensures that anyone has a place and a chance to talk and to be listened to.
This airport, with people leaving and coming, people from different nationalities and religions, with different memories and destinies,  dreams and experiences,  is very similar to Doctors Without Borders. Working for them is a personal challenge, involving a process of adjusting and rearranging what you know while interacting with local cultures.
As operators we need to pay attention and to understand the local culture in order to be able to plan a project.
As I walk through the airport, I happen to meet a family with three children dragging their small trolleys along as best as they can. I love young travelers. Especially now that everything is virtually closer, but perhaps emotionally further away. I have become a psychologist because I was interested in the human mind, attitudes, choices, limitations, and possibilities. I joined MSF because I coundn’t pass over anymore what was was going on far away, in barely known places that never get media attention. Because the Haitian boy has the same right to be heard as the Italian Martian. Because our stories are our healing, if we allow ourselves the time to meet. And then, over there, at the end of the corridor I spot him first by his cap, then by his gait, and finally by the backpack on his shoulders.  There he is! I run towards him and everything else no longer matters.

 

 

SIMONE

Moussa, 32 years old, intercultural mediator

“I will be very happy to help you, if I can,” I say, helping two women lift their backpacks. The people already seated turn to look at me. I know my voice is different from the one of the whites; it’s hoarser, lower. The sounds echo in my mouth before coming out. A colleague once told me, “Your voice echoes the drums of your homeland.”

I was born in the Ivory Coast and arrived in Italy twelve years ago, in Lampedusa. I don’t want to think about that journey anymore; it’s water under the bridge. I was twenty years old and had no idea about my future: I just wanted to live honestly and in peace. Now I live in Sicily, I work, I’m happy. I’m an intercultural mediator for MSF, I take care of migrants who speak my dialect or French, which is the official language in most of the African countries.

I am the connection between the doctor, the nurse, the psychologist on the one side and the migrant on the other. I don’t just translate language, I translate culture. I convey the meaning of words, behaviors, gestures, tone of voice of a culture to another. Things that are good in one culture may be felt as threatening in another one.

For example, looking someone in the eyes. In Italy it’s a friendly attitude and make you feel welcome  and listened to; in the Ivory Coast, however, it’s rude. If you don’t make it clear, people can’t understand and trust each other. Trust, such a beautiful word! Building trust is the goal of my work.

My job is difficult, demanding, and stressful, but it’s definitely worth it. Migrants arriving on Italian shores can’t manage  alone, because they risk losing themselves. Our work makes the difference.

MSF has an initial reception project for migrants arriving in Italy. We provide immediate psychological support to shipwreck survivors in the extremely difficult moment when they realize they’re alive but have lost a son, a brother, or a friend. They find themselves in a country where they don’t know the language or communication codes, and the words and gestures of white people can be puzzling.

I close my eyes. In the darkness of my closed eyelids, the faces of those I’ve met over the years take shape. I remember a young man who arrived in Italy at the end of his tether. His scars and apathy depicted the torture he’d endured in Libya. He no longer wanted to live, he only asked to sleep.

For an African arriving from a long journey through the hell of the Mediterranean, finding me, another African to talk to, is crucial. He recognizes himself and feels recognized. He immediately calls me “my brother,” asks my advice, begs me to report  something. I make them feel confident that whatever the whites say or do will not cause them any harm.

Everyone talks about the Mediterranean as the world’s largest cemetery. This is because they haven’t seen the desert migrants are forced to cross to reach Libya. A desert of sand and bones, where cars lose their tracks, run out of fuel, and you can only see dunes and heat all around. If you stumble, groan, fall, you are left back and die.

People who set out are aware that the journey will be dangerous, but they have never been told about the scorching desert and the sea that swallows deflated dinghies. When they become aware of this, when their horizon is made of hungry dunes claiming new victims, when they try to empty the sinking dinghy with their hands in the stormy sea,  they can no longer turn back. They can only continue and pray not to die.

It’s hard to hear these stories. You need nerve and commitment. And I do know I have it, for myself and for them. Twelve years ago I couldn’t figure out my future. It was just a vague, undefined hope. Now I have the words to define it. I am my future. Everything depends on me.

I look out of the window at the endless sky and can’t help but smile. Because I finally know who I am. My name is Moussa, I am thirty-two years old, and I am an intercultural mediator for MSF. I take my place in the world with dignity.