Louise Johnston is an Australian nurse and who has been working for MSF for about a year. Before MSF, Louise was an emergency nurse in Melbourne and had also spent some time working in a remote Australian Aboriginal community.

Haiti is her third mission with MSF and like the first two, this experience is just very different in nature. Louise’s first mission was on a massive emergency vaccination campaign against an epidemic of meningococcal meningitis, where MSF vaccinated 1.2 million people in Niger in just over 2 months. “That mission took me out into the remote depths of the sub-Saharan desert in the worst heat I have ever experienced, visiting some amazing villages.” Louise’s second mission was in the northern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, establishing the projects pharmacy and supervising the running of pediatric and surgical interventions in the hospital. Most of the Congolese people in the area were displaced through war and the terror inflicted by frequent violent attacks of the Lords Resistance Army.