MSF doctor’s journey of a lifeline to help the world’s vulnerable

Just as he had when working for Medicines Sans Frontieres in Basra, Iraq at the end of the insurgency in 2009, in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010, or in 2014 as part of a mobile clinic in South Sudan and treating patients in Sierra Leone at the height of the Ebola crisis, Dr Javid Abdelmoneim took away from his experience something very few doctors in the developing world - let alone ordinary citizens - have: perspective.

Dr Javid Abdelmoneim filming for the BBC documentary Ebola Frontline at Medecins Sans Frontieres’s case management centre, Kailahun, Sierra Leone. Fabio Basone / MSF

Whether treating refugees pulled from dinghies in the Mediterranean Sea or offering comfort to the dying in Sierra Leone during the Ebola crisis, the doctor with MSF has gained a rare perspective about the world's most vulnerable.

Dr Javid Abdelmoneim was excited when he heard about the new BBC documentary series on migration, Nature's Epic Journeys, until he found out it focused on the movement of animals, not human beings.

After helping to rescue and process thousands of people from rubber dinghies in the Mediterranean last year, most heading from Africa through Libya towards Italy, he can no longer bear to watch such programmes.

They celebrate the most natural of processes in animals, when so many people are trying desperately to do the same thing.

“I’m thinking, ‘Wow, we’re having it shoved down our throat to look in awe and wonder and beauty at the drive of nature, these animals who know no better, to move from an area of desert to an area of grassland and rain to give birth to their baby wildebeests’,” he says.

“But when a human being, our own species wants to do it? ‘No, get out, you’re not allowed to do it.’ Is that sheer stupidity or what? That’s the problem with us. Selfish to the end.”

The Sudanese-Iranian emergency physician with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) spent three weeks on the Aquarius, one of four ships that the organisation has operated since 2015.

He has also worked for MSF in Basra, Iraq, at the end of the insurgency in 2009, in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010, and in 2014 as part of a mobile clinic in South Sudan. At the height of the Ebola crisis, he was treating patients in Sierra Leone.

From these experiences, Dr Abdelmoneim has taken something very few people have in the developing world – perspective.

That perspective can be a challenge when, between his MSF trips and duties serving on the organisation’s UK board of directors, the Cambridge University graduate works part time in the trauma centre at St Mary’s Hospital in north-west London.

“You’ve been at one end of the world’s developmental scale and you parachute into the other end, so you have the weight of services behind you that makes diagnostics and investigation so easy, but you have the pressures of patient expectation,” he says.

“Patients are very different around the world.

“The expectation of a Londoner when they walk into accident and emergency is very high. ‘Why haven’t I had that scan yet? I’m going skiing next week, I need that scan today’.”

Dr Abdelmoneim recently visited Dubai, where MSF has a regional office and logistics depot. MSF has been in the UAE since 1992, supporting medical assistance and operations in Iraq, ­Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Yemen and Lebanon.

MSF UAE is also the primary centre providing help to people in Afghanistan, one of its largest operational programmes.

He had always dreamed of doing more than working with Britain’s National Health Service, and when he came across MSF in medical school he saw a fit with his interest in international ­affairs.

The job has also led to work as a presenter for selected BBC documentaries and television programmes.

Dr Abdelmoneim has visited MSF projects in Armenia, Congo and Jordan while reporting for the health magazine show The Cure on the Al Jazeera English network.

His profile as a health reporter and presenter rose after the BBC1 Panorama programme followed him during his time in ­Sierra Leone for the documentary Ebola Frontline.

He has also reported for the BBC1 programme The Truth About on topics including the "five-second rule" – the theory that food can sit on the floor for five seconds before it becomes bacteria-ridden – and whether humans can catch a cold simply by being cold.

Dr Abdelmoneim almost left MSF after his Haiti mission.

But it wasn't the cholera outbreak –where people arrived in wheelbarrows and were sometimes cared for three to a bed – that got to him.

It was that the scope of the mission – to treat trauma – did not allow for medication to help people suffering from other conditions that had nothing to do with the natural disaster, such as strokes, diabetes and malignant blood pressure.

"I was not given the tools to manage those, even though I knew the tools were there," says Dr Abdelmoneim. He took a job with the British foreign service that failed to materialise, before eventually choosing to give MSF another try.

That year brought two missions: South Sudan, where he witnessed and helped treat the malnutrition that has descended into famine; and Sierra Leone, where he worked during the most dire days of the Ebola outbreak.

Considering the survival rate was just 40 per cent, that work was also a dramatic departure for an emergency room doctor dedicated to saving lives.

“You’re not going to cure people,” he says. “You’re going to make their death comfortable.”

Dr Abdelmoneim’s health and that of his colleagues was in danger and they could not touch or comfort patients who knew they were dying. Even the Sierra Leonean medical staff they worked with asked: “Why are you here?”

The answer is something he has clearly thought about a lot.

“We were there,” says the doctor. “We tried. We showed humanity. We showed the will to care. We told those people, ‘You are important to us’.”

In the continuing human migration crisis, MSF has helped to rescue more than 50,000 people on the Mediterranean between 2015 and last year, but could not help the almost 5,000 who died. Dr Abdelmoneim says he was struck by one group in particular – children.

They are mixed in with the hordes pushed out of their lives in the Horn of Africa, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan, the asylum seekers and those who have been sold into slavery and sex slavery, who have already encountered unimaginable obstacles crossing the continent only to deal with tension, exploitation and other dangers in unstable Libya.

While almost half of the people fleeing Africa are women and children, 16 per cent of them are children travelling alone.

A 13-year-old Sudanese boy from Darfur, who was treated by Dr Abdelmoneim for chickenpox, could not even say where he was going.

“That’s how I was medically consulting. ‘Where are your parents?’ ‘I don’t know’,” he says. “You don’t pry. In psychological first aid, you don’t pry. Either he really doesn’t know, or he doesn’t want to talk about it.”

Yet Dr Abdelmoneim chuckles when he recalls encountering a tall, strong and confident 14-year-old from Mali. He was heading to meet his father in Paris, despite being told not to, and had left his mother without warning.

Like so many others he crossed the Sahara, navigated Libya and its human traffickers, only to end up with hundreds of others in a flimsy boat – and he did it all by himself.

“He was so smiley, so fit. So it’s not all doom and destruction,” the doctor says.

“But he wouldn’t have survived the dinghy ride. No matter who they are, what they’ve suffered, they will not survive crossing the Mediterranean in a dinghy. That’s why we’re there.”