Médecins Sans Frontières - WEBCLIP: Djoen Besselinck, back from Afghanistan (ENG)

Unique Identifier Code / URN MSF254718

Date taken / Date Recorded 16/12/2018 12:00 AM

Country Afghanistan

Commissioning section MSF-FRANCE

Photographer / videographer / producer Mohammad Ghannam

Copyright MSF

Usage Rights (MSF) External Media, MSF Fundraising, MSF Publications, Social Media

Formal Consent Copy available yes

Editor's rating ★★★ (F)

Video format h264 (Main) (avc1 / 0x31637661)

Duration 2m17s

Maximum Size 1920px × 1080px 80.86 MB

Additional Information / Shotlist Proposition
I think the first step is actually to acknowledge that it’s a country still at war. There’s still very much an ongoing conflict.

Back From The Field - Djoen Besselink - Country representative

Over the last 17 years, you see that the conflict has been increasing and especially the last few years, we’ve seen more and more active fighting in the provinces where we work.

So, you see people with burns, people with different kinds of wounds. We see a lot of direct consequences, a lot of burns from incidents. But the secondary consequences of the war is something we’ve been seeing very much increasing over the last few years.
We’ve been seeing that there’s less and less access to quality healthcare. Sometimes there is no staff or supplies have gone.
Over the last few years, the donor money has been decreased massively. So less and less quality healthcare is available for people and we see the consequences in our facilities. We’ve delivered about 200 babies a day over the last few months and we see that normally these people would have access to other facilities close to where they live. Sometimes people need to walk hours before they can get access to a place where they can get proper medical care. And this is then what we see in our facilities.
The difference in Kabul, it’s a city that over the last few years has been massively receiving people. From the areas where there is conflict, there’s a lot of displacement to the bigger cities where people sometimes feel safer although that’s interesting because there’s also quite a lot of attacks in Kabul. The economic situation also pushes people to come to the bigger cities. I think the people living under the poverty line is like very, very high at this moment. So, Kabul is a small city that had a massive influx of people. There’s a lot of people living there and the healthcare system is simply not able to take care of everyone in need of medical attention. So, also in Kabul, we see that our outpatient departments, our hospitals are overflowing. We see many, many patients coming every day and this is indeed a consequence of not finding free quality healthcare elsewhere in the city.

END