In the rare free moments she has had this year between visiting Ebola centres in west Africa and pleading for support in front of the UN, Dr Joanne Liu, international president of Médecins Sans Frontières, reread The Plague by Albert Camus. Unsurprisingly, it had extra resonance this time. She was particularly struck by the narrator Dr Rieux’s statement that he keeps going because he has never managed to get used to seeing people die. Telling me this, she pauses. “I think today it’s one of our problems. Somehow we got used to death and then we dehumanised it. We account for conflicts in figures. Ebola is 13,500 infected, 5,000 people have died… People are losing their sense of empathy, their sense of wanting to do something.”
No one can accuse MSF or the woman who leads it of that. Since the current outbreak of Ebola was confirmed in Guinea in March, the organisation has worked with more than 6,000 patients, manning the front lines in west Africa for months before the world started to take notice. MSF realised this epidemic was different from previous ones almost immediately. “Our experience [with Ebola] is that it’s in a remote village and the chain of transmission dies very quickly . . . That’s it. It’s over in less than three months,” says Liu. “This was different because it was geographically spread.” But the international community didn’t want to know: “We were told that we were getting too excited and ringing the alarm when everything was under control.” Matters were complicated by the sheer number of global crises demanding attention this year. “There was South Sudan and the Central African Republic [CAR] . . . DRC . . . Ukraine . . . and then Gaza was a full-blown crisis in July.”
MSF works in all of those places, with more than 32,000 staff in 67 countries last year. Founded in 1971 and largely privately funded, it provides independent humanitarian aid while bearing witness to what it sees on the ground.