Hello and welcome to my blog about doing medical work in the South Sudan! I promised many of you I would write one, as I did during my time as an Ebola doctor in Sierra Leone in 2015. I hope it will be informative, eye-opening, thought-provoking, useful.

Everything about this assignment differs from the one in Sierra Leone. To begin with, I don’t expect to be dealing with a severe, usually fatal, relatively easily transmitted disease – although, oddly enough, there actually is a new hemorrhagic fever that has emerged in exactly the part of South Sudan where I will be working (http://www.who.int/csr/don/19-may-2016-hf-south-sudan/en/). Happily, this one appears to be both very uncommon and very mild, easily treated with supportive measures. If that changes – well, at least I know how to put on PPE!

This time I will be working in my actual medical specialty – anesthesiology – in a government hospital in a large regional city, Aweil (in the northwest on the map). In principle, I will mostly be doing obstetrical cases (essentially, emergency C-sections). However, it appears that in practice I will also be called upon to provide procedural sedation for the large number of children they have at the hospital – primarily burns (from cooking fires), abscesses (from microbial infections), and injuries.

This time, too, I am not going with Partners in Health, but with Doctors Without Borders (or Medecins Sans Frontieres – MSF, from now on).

If you know anything at all about South Sudan, you may have vague memories of celebrations and congratulatory statements a few years ago, welcoming its independence from Sudan proper and its emergence as “the world’s newest nation.” All that happened in 2011. The country is rich in natural resources (especially oil), fertile, and well-watered; it is no longer at war with Sudan, as it was for most of the previous 60 years. 

But MSF only works in crisis zones, and MSF is still there. Why? What’s the crisis? I’ll get into that in my next post.