Merlin
This the blog of Merlin, an aid agency based in Britain that responds worldwide with vital health care and medical relief for vulnerable people caught up in natural disasters, conflict, disease and health system collapse.
Liberia: is there a doctor in the county?
Amy Waddell is a communications intern for medical aid agency Merlin who's working in Liberia. The West African country is recovering after 14 years of civil war, which resulted in 250,000 deaths and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Merlin is working with the health ministry to rebuild hospitals and clinics, supply medicines and equipment, and train and supervise health workers. At midnight an ambulance arrives at Zwedru's Martha Tubman Memorial Hospital in remote Grand Gedeh County. It brings a woman in labour, desperately needing a Caesarean section to save her and her unborn child. ...
Liberia: One week in Grand Walking County
Pam Gordon is the assistant to Merlin's Operations Coordinator in Liberia. She is a Canadian working for Merlin, the international medical aid agency, in post-conflict West Africa. Normally based in the capital Monrovia, she joined a week-long Merlin assessment to the remote county of Grand Kru, close to the border with Ivory Coast. Pam visited clinics that have never received international aid and are so inaccessible the Liberian government struggles to get vital drugs and staff to the area. Here is what she found in the rural heart of Liberia Dickson is both our skilled driver and passionate professor as we explore his home county of Grand Kru. Steering the Land Cruiser carefully over the broken bridges and muddy roads of southeast Liberia, he is eager to express his views on the complex history of this remote, abandoned area. Over hours of bumpy kilometres, listening to looped tracks of Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye, Dickson tells stories of Liberia's 14-year war that ended in 2003. The scars of conflict are still easy to spot, from empty schools to fallow fields, but Dickson points out others that I don't notice from the backseat of the car. The beautiful grass plains, he says, used to be full of cows, until a corrupt government official had thousands slaughtered so that she could easily land her private plane. Dickson also reminds me that ex-combatants from the war's many factions are not just the muscular men that intimidate the streets of Monrovia. They are also the teenagers (children during the war); mothers who've been raped; and fathers forced to fight to feed their families. ...
Gaza: Giving medical care in the only building in sight
Gaza Strip - March 19, 2009 Joanna Kotcher, Merlin's Health Coordinator in Gaza, is a nurse specializing in conflict and refugee health and has 13 years experience in humanitarian aid in conflict zones. Merlin, a global medical aid organization, entered Gaza February 11, 2009 and has partnered with Palestine Medical Relief Society (PMRS) to provide support to Gaza's devastated health system. I've been in the Gaza Strip for several weeks to assess the ongoing crisis. Our goal is to implement appropriate assistance for the people trapped in this profoundly damaged environment. ...
CAR: Why such poverty in a land of gold and diamonds?
Brooks Newmark, a British MP for the Conservative Party in Braintree, Essex, recently visited Central African Republic with Merlin. According to the aid agency, he's the first British MP to have visited the country. When I told my mother I was going to the Central African Republic, she replied, "The Congo, isn't that terribly dangerous?" ...
