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Trish Newport of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Switzerland is Inside Geneva’s first summer profile this year.
“My grandma was a humanitarian she had worked in Malawi and I remember when I was about 10 years old she said to me, ‘When you grow up and you become a humanitarian, you should work for MSF because they really have strong values and ethics that you will appreciate,’” says Newport.
Originally from Canada, she has worked all over the world, in the most challenging environments.
“I worked a lot in acute malnutrition response for a number of years, including in Niger. It’s hard to see, but you can really do something, for example a little malnourished child comes in and, if they get Plumpy Nut and proper care for six weeks, they become a fat little cute kid and they go home,” she says.
Now she’s at the heart of MSF’s Ebola response, in Bunia, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
“It’s not just an Ebola outbreak. It’s an Ebola outbreak in a context with massive humanitarian needs, that has high insecurity and where there’s ongoing conflict. We see the outbreak is starting to go into areas with high insecurity, where we hear about community deaths but you don’t have access to them, to be actually sampling to see if it’s Ebola or not, or to have a proper Ebola response.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) says this outbreak is spreading at record speed.
“A mother had her child, the child was sick, and then the mother died of Ebola. The grandmother took the baby, came to where our project is, and the grandmother died. The baby is now sick with Ebola, none of the family wants to come to the child because everyone that touches the child dies. It just breaks your heart,” says Newport.
“And people here they are people and we are all humans and so I have a hard time understanding why we can’t connect that way,” she says.
Join host Imogen Foulkes on Inside Geneva to listen to the full interview.
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Host: Imogen Foulkes
Production assitant: Claire-Marie Germain
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