Where Millions Need Care, Starting With One

By VICTORIA McEVOY, M.D., August 9, 2010, NY Times

At dawn, an old woman in a bright but tattered dress picked her way along a muddy, trash-strewn path. She stopped at a pile of garbage and carefully removed the remains of a dirty onion. Then she sat and slowly began to eat it for breakfast.

I was in southern Sudan as part of a medical team fromMassachusetts General Hospital — my first foray into international medical work. The goal of this pilot project was to teach Sudanese hospital staffs the basics of newborn care and resuscitation.

Southern Sudan has barely emerged from more than two decades of civil war, in which at least two million people died. Since the war ended in 2005, many of the aid agencies that were sustaining education, nutrition and health care have pulled out, and despite the heroic efforts of those that remain, most citizens’ day-to-day existence is shocking. As a tent camp manager in the town of Wau observed, “The peace is killing us.”

Pictures of these war-torn regions do no justice to the physical and emotional realities. It was boiling hot each day as we trekked over dusty, crater-filled streets filled with noisy motorcycles and honking jitneys. After lugging our equipment to the hospital, we were sweaty and exhausted by the time we began rounds in the children’s ward with the sole pediatrician.

The hospital was beyond imagination. Beds were overflowing with infants and children, many of them desperately ill with malaria, malnutrition or viral diseases. Babies with diarrhea wore no diapers, but were wrapped in simple cloths that their mothers would rinse out periodically in the hospital yard.

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