Trip to the field

I was in the field last week for 4 days. The main purpose of the trip was to explain our work on the job function scale to the personnel delegates. We are trying to approach the MSF Congo scale to the MSF International scale. Part of the process is to have the delegates sign that they understand the idea behind the changes and that we have explained the process for regularization with the people who will drop a grade. Not so easy, but our delegates are pretty reasonable. After that, we need to present the plan to the labor office.

It is always good to get out of our coordination office to the field, to get back in touch with what we really do. I was at one site at the same time as two Australian journalists who are working with us to witness to the world the situation here. I made myself useful by doing some translations. We sat in on some consultations with women who had just been raped (This site sometimes receives 20 new sexual violence cases a day.). The consulting nurse would explain the reason for our presence, explain the consultation process, listen to the story of the girls, then proceed with the medical exam and whatever treatment was necessary afterwards (we would be gone before the exam). The nurse translated the stories from Swahili to French, and I translated from French to English. The stories were pretty dramatic, especially the 20 year old who has now been raped twice in one year. Most are attacked by armed men (often more than one) on their way to or from the fields where they cultivate the crops their families need to survive. Via radio campaigns, the women know to come to our health center quickly after the aggression so that we can start prophylaxic treatment to avoid sexually-transmitted diseases and other complications. They have very strong characters and I am in awe of their courage in dealing with such traumatic events.

Since I was here in 2005 and 2006, I know quite a few of the Congolese staff in the programs, so field trips also a time to catch up with good friends. We had the luck to pass through one more site than expected on the return trip, and for me it was like a homecoming.

Upon my arrival here in Goma, we had a big meeting with the head of one of the programs that I had just visited, which is doing some very interesting work in trying to bring up the quality of patient care in the public hospital in which we work in cooperation with the public health system. It was a really constructive meeting, and I think that we now have clear goals of what we can do, and what we can’t. It is a big, exciting program which will need a lot of attention and consistency in management to fulfil the goals we agreed to.

All in all, it was a great week.