I want to tout the Official Website Charity™ today, Doctors Without Borders (DwB), or, to use its official name, Médicins Sans Frontières. Reader Pyers pointed out to me an article in today’s Torygraph that describes the organization and its efforts. And believe me, I vetted this organization thoroughly before I designed it as the site’s charity: it’s completely secular, full of dedicated people, and the vast bulk of donations (over 87%) go for medical assistance. It gets the highest rating from Charity Navigator.
Of course, one of the reasons I want you to read this piece is because eventually I’ll ask readers to donate again, as I’m thinking of having a raffle for Faith versus Fact when it comes out, with a specially autographed first-edition hardcover copy (with a drawing to the winner’s specifications) going to a randomly selected reader who donates a modest sum to the organization.
At any rate, the Torygraph piece is long, dealing largely with a description of how DwB operated during the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone. I doubt that I would have had the courage to work with Ebola victims! After that, the piece talks a little about the organization:
For four decades MSF volunteers have worked in war zones and disaster areas, but probably never in conditions as harrowing or lonely as this. ‘It was awful, really, really awful, seventh level of hell stuff,’ Henry Gray, the British operations manager of MSF’s Ebola Response Team, said.
It is easy to be sceptical about large international NGOs, to see them as bloated, bureaucratic and ineffective. I was appalled by the way they used the Haiti earthquake of 2010 to raise vast amounts of money, little of which benefited the victims. But I have long made an exception for MSF, not least because I have repeatedly found their volunteers quietly working away in appalling conditions in some of the world’s worst hell holes.
Long after most of the other NGOs – and television cameras – had left Haiti, for example, I found MSF in Cité Soleil, reputedly the Western hemisphere’s worst slum, treating legions of destitute Haitians racked by cholera. In 2012 I found them secretly helping the bombed and traumatised civilians of rebel-held northern Syria when no other major NGO dared operate there.
Founded in 1971 by a group of French doctors outraged by Nigeria’s blockade and starvation of the secessionist province of Biafra, and by the international community’s silent complicity in that atrocity, its medics have since worked on the front line of countless catastrophes. They have delivered aid to beleaguered civilians during wars, genocides, revolutions, plagues, earthquakes, floods and famines. They have risked their lives in all the world’s most notorious ‘beauty spots’ – Rwanda, Congo, Somalia, Bosnia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Chechnya, Gaza, the Central African Republic, Darfur, South Sudan, eastern Ukraine. ‘First in, last out’ is their mantra.
Can you beat that? There’s more, and I’ll have to limit myself lest I reproduce the whole piece:
MSF has had scores of volunteers killed, wounded and abducted, but curtails a mission only in extreme circumstances – after five of its staff were kidnapped in Syria, the murder of five others in Afghanistan, and multiple killings and abductions in Somalia. In 1999 it won the Nobel Peace Prize.
It is now the world’s largest medical humanitarian organisation, with 23 national associations, an annual budget of well over $1 billion and more than 35,000 local and international staff in more than 60 countries. Yet it remains more of a grass-roots movement than an organisation – a small army of doctors, nurses, engineers and logisticians all committed to the ethos of its founders.
Its primary goal is to provide health care to people in need regardless of their race, religion or affiliations. To do that it remains resolutely neutral in any conflict, and independent of any political, religious or economic powers. It will talk to the most brutal terrorist organisations and repressive regimes to access the civilian populations they control – the Taliban, Islamic State, Somalia’s al-Shabaab, Boko Haram. It insists only that its staff’s safety is assured, and that it can deliver aid without interference. It withdrew from North Korea in 1998 because the regime was diverting MSF aid, and spurned the US-led humanitarian programme in Afghanistan because it was part of the battle for Afghan hearts and minds.
By the same token MSF medics will treat anyone – wounded al-Qaeda fighters, Syrian soldiers or Sudanese cattle raiders who have attacked villages and slaughtered women and children – provided they leave their weapons outside. It knows that they may well resume their killing once they have recovered. ‘We don’t do good or bad. It’s not for us to judge,’ Paul McMaster, the retired NHS surgeon who chairs MSF UK, insists.
Now how can you do worse than help an organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize? Finally, if you’re not convinced, have a look at this:
MSF’s pursuit of neutrality and independence extends to fundraising. Almost all its income is from private donors – five million of them. It seldom accepts money from governments, but never from the defence, oil, mining and pharmaceutical industries. Unlike other NGOs, moreover, it does not exploit specific disasters to raise funds for general use, or use emotionally manipulative images. Six days after the 2004 Asian tsunami it infuriated other NGOs by announcing it had raised enough.
MSF is lean. The base salary for a field worker is less than £12,000 a year, and Joanne Liu, the president, earns a mere £76,000. Even top officials fly economy. Life in the field is so spartan that the MSF house where I stayed in Freetown turned off its generator all day to save money.
The piece is much longer than the excerpts I’ve given here, and describes the organization as egalitarian, full or arguments, contentious, but above all immensely dedicated. Running it is apparently like herding cats. But it is about as good as a secular organization can get (that’s not to imply that religious ones are better!), and if we atheists are going to do something tangible to make a better world, this is a very good way to do it. Best of all, DwB is not American or British, or anything. They’re cosmopolitan in both composition and the people they help; and, after all, shouldn’t aid go not just to those who happen to live in your country, but to those on the planet who have the greatest need?
