Speaking of bed nets, they are not only life-saving (and cost-effective) tools for preventing malaria, they also function in place of high-tech medical equipment.
The green and blue scrubs are the same as on TV, the concentration as intense as in any operating theatre. But beeping high-tech monitors are conspicuous by their absence. In remote areas of Darfur, the ICRC’s Flying Surgical Team performs life-saving operations under the shade of a baobab tree, with the simplest equipment.
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“We can operate anywhere,” says Lizzie [a nurse on the ICRC’s Field Surgical Team (FST)], “as long as we can hang a mosquito net. And if we have to, we can just hang a mosquito net between our two trucks.” Those of us brought up on TV programmes full of high-tech operating theatres will have trouble imagining a surgeon working under a baobab tree, but that is the usual setting for most of the FST’s operations.
Sending bed nets to refugees remains, of course, a good idea.
(image from flickr user Rita Willaert under a Creative Commons license)