Twenty-nine-year-old Alan De Lime Pereiera first heard of the humanitarian aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières at the beach shack his mother runs. After the Bhuj earthquake, a few people from MSF came down for a holiday to Goa. “They were at my mother’s shack and were talking about the humanitarian aid,” he said during a Skype interview.
That was nearly 10 years ago.
This week, Mr. Pereiera is returning from the front lines of Al Daleh, Yemen, where he served as a doctor in the emergency medical unit. He wants to speak about what he saw because one of MSF’s tenets is to ‘bear witness’ to one of the worst humanitarian crisis unfolding in the world right now.
He finished his MBBS in 2008 from the Goa Medical College and joined MSF in June 2009 as a national doctor working in Bijapur, Chhattisgarh. He worked there till December 2009. After short stints in South Sudan and Ethiopia, Mr. Pereiera found himself into Sierra Leone as a doctor in the high risk unit of Ebola treatment centre.
“We see horrible things on duty. One of our main tenets is bearing witness and telling the world about it. The world needs to know what is happening in these areas— conflict zones, Ebola territories— because the world needs to do more about it,” he said when asked about volunteering to go in to the world’s worst danger zones.
While at MSF’s Al Daleh facility, Mr. Pereiera witnessed extreme acts of violence and unacceptable suffering, he says. “Yemen is going through one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. In a few years, the young lives lost due to malnutrition will equal those who died due to violence in the country,” he said.
Under attackIn Yemen, besides the UN and the Red Cross, MSF runs of its largest projects with nearly 2,100 staffers working in the conflict zone. Since October last year, four of MSF’s medical facilities in Yemen have been bombed— resulting in two hospitals, a clinic and an ambulance coming under fire.
“Since the war began, every side has violated the Geneva Convention, by attacking medical facilities,” he added. Between March and December 2015, MSF alone treated nearly 20,000 war wounded Yemeni patients.
According to the organisation, nearly 80 per cent of Yemeni population — some 21 million people — require assistance; almost half of the population is facing food insecurity and a famine is looming large in the near future. The war has already claimed at least 6,000 lives, about half of them civilian.
“At this point, not a lot of humanitarian aid is coming in. If that does not change, besides deaths due to gunshot wounds, etc, there is going to be a massive outbreak of vaccine preventable diseases. There will be a full scale famine as well,” Alan said.
Three months in Yemen is not something most families would agree to. “They knew I was like this. Even when I was in India and sent into Naxalite territories, my family was edgy. But they have learnt to trust MSF and now are extremely supportive of my ways,” added Mr. Pereiera.
As the conflict wages on, nearly 100 bombings near or on medical facilities have been reported by the International Committee of the Red Cross, between March and November 2015 alone.
