Something is better than nothing

As written in a previous post, MSF medical teams have to import pretty much everything when they set up somewhere in the D.R. Congo, and MSF's surgeons, who come from all over the world, usually on one- to three-month contracts, for the most part are used to far better equipped facilities.

Above are a handful of shots of equipment and facilities, mostly snapped at a hospital run by MSF in Gety, Ituri province. MSF teams will build the beds in which patients convalesce. The centrifuge you see in one shot is hand-cranked. There was only one microscope in every Congolese medical facility I saw, and the "blood banks" I encountered in hospitals contained only a handful of bags of blood. [Other shots that may require brief explanation are of a hospital pharmacy (the second shot) and a bin of handwashing solution (last photo).]

And yet for the most part, the facilities established and operated by MSF are vastly superior to those run by the government, and the available care so much more attractive that the communities in which MSF sets up shop see dramatic population growth. Something is better than nothing.