Médecins Sans Frontières - WEBCLIP - ENGLISH - ITW Project Coordinator Mosul West

Unique Identifier Code / URN MSF329921

Date taken / Date Recorded 04/08/2020 12:00 AM

Country Iraq

Commissioning section MSF-SWITZERLAND

Photographer / videographer / producer Manhal Alkallak

Copyright MSF

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

Formal Consent Copy available no

Editor's rating ★★★★★ (C)

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

Duration 5m20s

Maximum Size 1080px × 1080px 671.68 MB

Additional Information / Shotlist And the midwife she says “it was complete madness today”, “ok so what happened?” “We had 44 babies!”
My name is Esther Van der Woerdt, I am from Holland, I am Project Coordinator for MSF, and I have just spend the two last years in our project in Nablus, Mosul in northern Iraq
TEXT BOARD:
How is the situation in Mosul?

You can see that life is back in the city after the end of the conflict and the battle. Bridges have been rebuilt, there are new buildings showing up, but there is still a lot of debris, a lot of ruins, the old city is still very much in ruins. At the economic level you can see that life is coming back, there is more and more trade, you can see small commerce opening. But at the same time nowadays because of Covid-19 that is actually really problematic and it is stopping again these small commerce activities. The health system is really far from what it was from back before the conflict. There are hospitals that have been rebuilt and that have reopened but when you look at the number of hospitals, the number of services and the quality of the services, it is really still lacking a lot.
TEXT BOARD:
How is MSF working?
We started completely in the beginning as support during the battle, so a lot of trauma surgery and after the end of the battle we moved pretty much towards sexual and reproductive health activities. By now we are a hospital with more or less 80 beds. We have an ER room where we have per day more than 130 consultations. Of course we have a paediatric ward. We have a maternity where we have on average between 20 and 30 babies being born per day. We had this one day where we knew only afterwards that one of the public hospitals had closed because there were health workers who had Covid-19 symptoms and all their patients were coming to us. I usually don’t stay around to count the number of kids that are coming out but I usually ask at the end of the day when I’m sitting in the car on the way to the guest house “how was it today? Was it busy?” and the midwife she says “it was complete madness today”, “ok so what happened?” “We had 44 babies!” “What? You had 44 children?” Ok, that was a lot and I think that the circumstances of Covid-19 have something to do with that, clearly, but sometimes that happens.
TEXT BOARD:
How is Covid-19 impacting the situation?
Covid-19 was an unexpected complication. The needs in Mosul nowadays are pretty much twofold. In general there is a big need for the continuation of our normal lifesaving services. At the same time we have this covid pandemic and we need people to respond to that as well. In Mosul there are not a lot of organisations who are willing and able to respond to this, but also the authorities do not seem able to completely respond to the Covid-19 crisis. They are lacking pretty much everything: they’re lacking funds, they are lacking beds, they are lacking disinfection material, they are lacking protective equipment. There is nothing that they have to ensure a proper response to this.
TEXT BOARD:
What will you remember?
Many things. Obviously many stories as well. One story that I found very interesting was… we needed to tell a father who came with his child who looked like she had brain damage and it seemed that she was not going to make it. The father was super confident that she was going to survive and when we asked why that was he told us: “more or less a year ago my oldest daughter was hit by a car and we brought her here. When she arrived here the doctors told us to be prepared and they said it looks like she is not going to survive. But they were so great and thankfully look at her now”. She was sitting perfectly healthy at the bed of her little sister. And what do you know, a couple of days later the little one is discharged and is perfectly fine as well. And the father was 100% confident. He never doubted one second that we were going to cure his babies and that was really beautiful.