My 20th assignment: Return to Yemen

16 years of medical aid with MSF and today I’m heading to Yemen for my 20th assignment. There have been lots of changes in my life and in MSF. Our organisation has always been trying to support our patients and the community in the best and most cost-effective way. As for myself, I’ve already done 19 assignments in 9 different countries which included Liberia, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic in Africa, then Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan in west of Asia and the Middle East, Papua New Guinea in the east, and  Haiti in the Americas after the earthquake in 2010.

In the first half of my MSF career, I served mostly as the stand-alone surgeon in the hospital and sometimes in a region of 200,000 population. With this reality I was forced to improve and excel in every aspect of surgery otherwise I felt I’ve failed our patients if the knowledge and skill is beyond me. Starting as a general surgeon, I needed to learn obstetric and gynecology as 20-30% of our surgeries are caesarian section for difficult labors, then trauma surgery and orthopedics to handle lots of trauma in these regions, but of course our infection control is not good enough for high end internal fixations (which we only do them in specialised projects). With abundance of trauma wounds, I needed to excel myself to cover the wounds so that our patients could recover early with least complications. In view of that I need do lots of skin grafts then flap surgeries which give a much better healed wounds for our patients, not to mention that some of these flaps could prevent lots of amputations. Finally, I need to do some vascular repair in some of these trauma patients to salvage their limbs. As a result, it’s been 15 years of non-stop studying so as to give my best care to our patients.

With all these experiences and knowledges gained, I started doing training on national surgeons since 2017. Starting in Afghanistan, Iraq then 4 times in Yemen. The standard of the surgeons in these countries are quite good, so I would assess their need and accompanied them for difficult surgeries and share my opinion and experiences then I did systemic training on them in wound reconstructive surgery as all these 3 countries are in conflict areas with lots of wounded. Result of the training varied with some surgeons picked up the knowledge and skill nicely whom I feel so proud of them. All these times I did 3 months training for each project which was really too short, for some of the projects I went with, the training seemed unfinished. Hopefully this time my return for 6 months to one of the hospitals I provided trainings previously,  will have a better result for our surgeons, that we can achieve a good sustainability on the surgeries I trained them.

Wish our surgeons and I the best in the next 6 months!

Looking forward to my second home there with our dear teammates!