Afghanistan

Blogs Team

Four powerful personal stories from our work around the world – March 2021

This month's highlights from the Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) blog

31 Mar 2021 / 3 minute read

Luiza Noronha

Anaesthetics

“Khost, the place I consider my second home”

Khost province is located in the southeast of Afghanistan, close to the border with Pakistan. This place was my home during three incredible and intense months, while I worked as an anaesthetist at the MSF maternity working and living alongside many like minded others from around the world and from the local community.

24 Feb 2017 / 3 minute read

Jan Pouza

Logistician

Afghanistan: Building maternity wards (and a volleyball court!)

Report from a logistician turning his skills at the Boost hospital in Afghanistan which is one of the biggest MSF-supported hospital projects in the world: providing surgery, internal medicine, emergency services and intensive care. It also specialises in treating tuberculosis and malnutrition.

01 Dec 2016 / 6 minute read

Franziska Noll

Paediatrician

Premature baby fights for her life

She is a happy and satisfied little baby with chubby cheeks, enjoys breastfeeding and cuddling with her mother and sleeps a lot. She is a 74-day-old baby. The 29-year-old mother is very proud of her first child. This sounds like the start of a pretty standard story of a baby girl and the tale could have taken place in many different countries around the world… But Farishta was born in Afghanistan and she did not have an easy start in life.

06 Jan 2016 / 4 minute read

Kandice Li

Obstetrician / Gynaecologist

Back to Afghanistan!

The team head up for a medical meeting, but noticed that midwife and gynecologist are missing. The field coordinator informed them that they were preparing for a C-section and she heads over to the operating theater (OT) immediately to find a baby with a dramtically slow heart beat.

27 Jul 2015 / 3 minute read

Steffen Hillebrand

Doctor

Leaving

With this stay almost over steffen reflects on the changes to the hospitl since his last post: moves for the newborn intensive care unit (NICU) and the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). The NICU is embellished with flowers and animals.

12 Jun 2015 / 3 minute read

Ally Moebus

Nurse

Good Things Come in Threes

Having spent most of her nursing career in Australia working at a tertiary paediatric hospital, she had already been present at more births in Afghanistan than previously in her nursing career. Six weeks earlier she could never have imagined being part of the neonatal team waiting anxiously for the births of triplets.

04 Jun 2015 / 3 minute read

Wong Poh Fei

Doctor

Ode to my parents

Wong Poh Fei recounts breaking the news of her recruitment to MSF for a first assignment in Sierra Leone just before the Ebola crisis broke out. Then she feels apprehensive as she has to break the news that she is leaving for Afghanistan.

07 May 2015 / 6 minute read

Wong Poh Fei

Doctor

Breathe: The story of Saleem

It was an unspoken understanding that a sick newborn’s life is fragile in this country and that the loss of a child is a common occurrence in many women’s lives. This sick women had had a long journey to the hospital and delivered a baby boy. However, he had severe breathing difficulties because his lungs were not able to function properly. He stopped breathing several times, but pulls through.

09 Apr 2015 / 6 minute read

Steffen Hillebrand

Doctor

Coping

One of the quadruplets that I told you about in my previous post had unfortunately died. Apparently while I was gone, all four of them got a respiratory infection and since they live far away from the hospital, one of them did not make it in time to be treated. When I see patients like these newborns that are doing so well it makes me happy, but the challenges in dealing with death here can be quite hard.

08 Apr 2015 / 3 minute read

Wong Poh Fei

Doctor

"You cannot change the circumstances, but you can change yourself"

At MSF Khost Maternity Hospital (also known as the ‘baby factory’), where roughly 50 babies are born daily she describes her daily rounds. She deals with a difficult delivery, with a baby born with a bulge at the forehead and is called on for a resuscitation.

20 Mar 2015 / 7 minute read

Steffen Hillebrand

Doctor

Quadruplets

The quadruplets lie all together in an incubator in our neonatal intensive care unit in Boost Hospital in Helmand province, Afghanistan. They were delivered naturally and they are doing well. This is not alwasy the case in the conditions that we work under.

27 Jan 2015 / 4 minute read

Afghanistan

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