Premium
Mission in Afghanistan
Author(s) -
Simpson Robert A
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
medical journal of australia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.904
H-Index - 131
eISSN - 1326-5377
pISSN - 0025-729X
DOI - 10.5694/j.1326-5377.2002.tb04992.x
Subject(s) - citation , frontier , library science , medicine , computer science , political science , law
THE FIRST, AND ONLY, TIME I questioned my decision to spend seven months working with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Afgh nista was when I crossed the tarmac of Hobart Airport to board my flight there on 17 February, 1999. My decision to go had been driven partly by a growing frustration with the increasing bureaucratic constraints of general practice and partly by a desire to re-explore the challenges of Third World medicine. My first encounter, many years ago, had been in Bangladesh, where cases seemed to walk straight out of the pages of Bailey and Love’s venerable Short practice of surgery. Now, I was headed for a very different country, which, as we all know, has been subject to 20 years of continuous and continuing warfare. About a million Afghans have been killed during this time and at least 700 000 people displaced within the country itself, as well as two to three million refugees to neighbouring Pakistan and elsewhere. Key health indicators place Afghanistan among the most unfortunate countries in the world (Box 1). Life expectancy — at just 45 years of age — and childhood and maternal mortality figures are nearly the worst in the world. The mission where I was to be stationed for the next seven months — in the village of Baharak in the very impoverished northeastern province of Badahkshan (Box 2) — had just reopened; it had been shut down in 1990 after the murder of a French MSF logistician. As I boarded my flight and the plane took to the air, I dismissed any misgivings about my decision and pondered what lay ahead. Based in Baharak