Working with MSF in Kenya

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Very belated greetings to all my friends and colleagues. I was in Nairobi, Kenya here for a year and have completed my mission. As many of you know, I am working for Mèdecins sans Frontiéres (MSF) - Doctors Without Borders - with the French section. I’m now waiting to hear about my next mission. Here’s some information about my experience in Kenya. More about my work in the next blog.

Nairobi

A large city of around 3 million people and a hub of travel, finance and politics for East Africa, Nairobi is a modern city with many beauties. The climate is mild, neither especially hot nor especially cold. There are flowering plants and trees in abundance throughout the city.



And if your house doesn’t have enough of them, you can purchase more at one of the many nurseries that entrepreneurs have set up on land next to many of the roads.



As might be expected, the vegetation attracts a large variety of birds from noisy Hadada ibis calling from our neighbors’ roofs to beautiful little multi-colored sunbirds flitting through our garden.


Life in Nairobi also has its challenges, probably the greatest of which is the traffic. We can spend an hour or more each in ‘the jam’, trying to go a few kilometers from home to office or the clinic (my record is 1 ¾ hours to go about 10 km - 6 miles).



And while there are rules of the road, drivers of the local buses, matatus (mostly 15-passenger vans which are privately owned) are always in a hurry, passing inside or out of the line of vehicles which are stopped dead or crawling along. Sometime they create 4 lanes of traffic on a 2-lane road. There are only 1 or 2 traffic lights in the city (which are pretty much ignored) and traffic circles (roundabouts) ‘control’ the traffic at intersections. I’m glad not to be driving here, as it is pretty hair-raising.



My residence

For the second half of my time here we lived in a 4-bedroom apartment plus servant’s quarters in a complex of 24 units. We had to move (landlord raised the rent) from a townhouse in another section of Nairobi, where we had a small backyard garden (missed that).



I lived with 3 of my MSF colleagues. The first team included Caroline, a French clinical psychologist who ran the Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV) program, Khalid, a Sudanese physician who was the Deputy Field Coordinator for our project, and Maggie, an American nurse practitioner who has been with MSF for over 7 years and was our Field Coordinator. They all left in August or early September, and were replaced by Attar, Israeli psychologist, Milja, Croatian physician and her partner Tierry, French logistician, and Angels, Spanish (Catalan) psychologist. Milja and Tierry moved out and were replaced by Sherri, American MSW. So you can see it is quite an international group.

Next blog: my work with MSF France Kenya.

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