Doctors Without Borders: A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City

Sunday, the end.More than 1,600 visitors today. All of them had been waiting in the wind and the cold to be able to have a glance at the Refugee Camp. Heartwarming for us, the guides...

MSF thanks everyone who came out to the exhibit in San Francisco, LA, Santa Monica, and San Diego...

As the Democratic Republic of Congo continues to be in the news, visitors to the Refugee Camp exhibit have been asking what MSF is doing to help the vast numbers of people who have been wounded and displaced yet again...

Peninah Ndungu, a Kenyan national and an MSF clinical officer (similar to a physician's assistant), talks about one of the hardest situations she had to deal with while working in a refugee camp in Uganda.  

A Kenyan clinical officer, similar to a physician's assistant in the US, talks about how she very reluctantly started working with MSF in a refugee camp.   

The 42 million people uprooted by war who we talk about during the exhibit does not include those displaced by natural disasters, such as earthquakes and hurricanes...

"C'est parti !" - that's the easy way to express in French this moment of starting again. At 8:54, the first students with their teacher arrive at the main gate, and slowly, each guide takes a group and dive into their 45-minute explanation...

In addition to being a nurse and having served as a coordinator and head of mission for different MSF projects around the world, Luis is now an operations coordinator based in Brussels, and is responsible for overseeing MSF missions in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where new...

Mayor Jerry Sanders welcomed MSF and A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City to San Diego during a press conference held at the exhibit on Thursday...

The last stop on the 2008 Refugee Camp tour begins now. We will be in Balboa Park from Thursday, November 6, to Sunday, November 9, from 9 am to 5:30 pm every day. In California, we have had a total of 9,074 visitors to the exhibit so far...

We are now in San Diego, the smallest of the cities on this tour, and also the last one. Time has passed by very quickly, as it often does when you are enjoying yourself, and now the end is near. In a way, I'm happy this is the last city. The field is calling me back...

MSF anesthesiologist Shobha Varthaman talks about MSF's programs in Sulemaniyah, northern Iraq, and Amman, Jordan, where surgeons perform maxillofacial, plastic, and orthopedic surgery on civilian victims of war.See a slideshow about MSF's project in Amman with photos of Ahmed*, the little boy...

A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City had a great run in Santa Monica this past weekend with a total of 2,156 visitors. Now the exhibit is heading towards San Diego where we will be in Balboa Park from November 6 to 9, from 9 am to 5:30 pm every day...

Yesterday, I was writing, that our teams leave refugee camps before sunset and go back into the camp the following morning. We are moving in big white 4x4 vehicles, huge cars with big black antennas for radio communication, very often equiped with bullbars...

Saturday and Sunday, as schools are closed, a lot of families are visiting the camp, maybe in combination with a walk on the beach...

More than 300 attendees packed the theater inside the San Diego Natural History Museum on Wednesday night to hear a panel discussion with four MSF field workers–Lorena Bilbao, Mary Jo Frawley, Alan Hickey, and San Diego-based surgeon Sandra Freiwald. The event was moderated by Alison St...

MSF aid workers Chris Sauer and Kathy Dedieu were interviewed on Friday for KABC's and KLOS's public affairs program, "Spotlight on the Community." It airs on 790 KABC-AM on Saturday morning and on 95.5 KLOS-FM on Sunday morning, both days at 6 am...

The Refugee Camp exhibit opened today by the Santa Monica Pier...

8 o’clock in the morning, the back doors of the truck open, the first boxes of material are lowered with the tail lift. In 6 hours, the MSF team will have finished installing the Refugee Camp exhibition in the parking lot next to Santa Monica Pier and world-famous Muscle Beach...

More than 300 people gathered at TOWN HALL Los Angeles on Tuesday night to see Dr. James Orbinski, former president of MSF International. Dr...

MSF nurse Michelle Belletete worked at Jude Anne Hospital, in an obstetrics program in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, for high-risk pregnancies...

This coming Wednesday – October 29 – MSF will hold a panel discussion at the San Diego Natural History Musem in advance of the Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City exhibition which will be at Balboa Park November 6-9...

Thanks to all the visitors who came out to A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. In addition to excellent visitors, we also got some good press, including from LAist blog, and the Los Angeles Times...

Monday -- 27 October0830 - It looks like another perfect day of weather here in Griffith Park. At the hotel, near the ocean, we woke to a moderate fog that thinned as we drove east on the freeway. It is refreshingly cool this morning...

 Saturday, 24 October - 0900—We're at the camp, ready for another day. The sky is clear again. The drive to Griffith Park took only 30 minutes this morning, without commuters on the road making their way to work...

Philip Sacks describes the challenges of his work in a camp for Hmong refugees in Thailand. Thursday morning, 0830 -- I drove the first van run from the hotel this morning. Eight of us on our way by 7 am, with a quick coffee stop then onto the I-10 freeway...

In some communities where MSF works, women are viewed quite differently than what we are accustomed to in developed countries. MSF logisticians are often in charge of hiring and managing teams of local workers - usually men - and negotiating with authority figures...

Many people that come to A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City bring a camera and take pictures as they go on the tour.  As part of the staff I have been around the exhibit for so long that I forget what it's like to see each station for the first time.  I find it very interesting to see it...

Janet Kerr helped create a mental health component to MSF's project at Kalma Camp—one of the largest internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in the world—in Darfur in 2006. She and a Sudanese assistant trained 12 community workers in Kalma in basic mental health coping mechanisms...

Phil gives a tour in San Francisco. On Monday, we broke down the camp in San Francisco. Funny, my friend Karen wrote to me last night that her vision of the camp breakdown is infused with images of "bugging out" from the TV show Mash...

MSF aid worker and office staff Nicolas Beaudoin helped conceive of and initiate the Refugee Camp exhibit, first in France in 1996 and again in the U.S. in 2000...

A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City was a great success in San Francisco. We had approximately 3,250 people come through and learn about the plight of refugees and internally displaced persons around the world...

Refugee Camp exhibit guide Ya-Ching Lin, an epidemiologist and field coordinator who has been on nine MSF assignments, talks about what it was like to conduct a nutritional survey in Darfur.

After a great run in San Francisco, A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City opened today in Los Angeles at Griffith Park with a press conference featuring Dr. Matthew Spitzer, MSF USA Board President, and Tom LaBonge, member of the Los Angeles City Council. Dr...

Refugee Camp exhibit guide Ya-Ching Lin, an epidemiologist and field coordinator who has been on nine MSF assignments, talks about what it was like to conduct a nutritional survey in Darfur.

Day 3 ... So, what is it really like to work in a war zone as an expatriate doing humanitarian work...

Here's a quick note to pass along some of the continuing local media coverage in San Francisco from KCBS, CBS 5, insidebayarea.com (the Oakland Tribune), and the Long Beach Telegram. And, listen to this interview with MSF nurse Donna Canali on NPR station KQED, which also ran an online slideshow. 

 Above, MSF nurse Donna Canali explains cholera to visitors at the Refugee Camp exhibit. And here are some striking excerpts from the journal she kept while working in Lumbago, Angola, in 2006 and 2007 during a cholera outbreak...

Day 2 and the stories continue to come to mind. As I speak about the dangers of just going a reasonable distance to obtain water or to use a latrine, I recall the patient I operated on in the middle of the night while in the Congo...

Last night, a panel of MSF aid workers spoke about their diverse experiences and took questions from the audience during a panel discussion moderated by local health reporter Sarah Varney.Below is an excerpt of the panel discussion in which MSF nurse Donna Canali describes what she experienced...

 Below are the pictures that Dr. Wan showed the students in the video.  They are before and after photos of patients in the nutrition program that he worked at in Liberia in 2003. Elijah, Liberia 2003 Miatta, Liberia 200

Photos from A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City in San Francisco.  View full size slideshow

Hi. My name is Cristiana. I'm a general surgeon here in the States who, over the past two years, has had the amazing privilege (or maybe just an insane inclination) to complete three assignments in the field with MSF...