How a Humanitarian Group Helps the Needy

By Caroline Preston

When Doctors Without Borders was founded in 1971, it earned a reputation for its willingness to provide humanitarian

aid in places few other charities wanted to go. For example, it was the first relief group to enter Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion, and it deployed a few workers to southern Sudan during the late 1980s.

But as the group has gotten older, it has become somewhat more cautious and no longer wants to be known by nicknames such as “the cowboys of emergency aid,” writes the journalist Dan Bortolotti in Hope in Hell: Inside the World of Doctors Without Borders, a book published in November by Firefly Books.

Last month the charity pulled its workers out of Iraq, out of fear for their safety, and in June, it left Afghanistan after the murders of five employees.

While the group may be less willing to take on overly dangerous missions, it has not lost its desire to speak out about what it sees as injustices.

When it left Afghanistan, it criticized the United States and its military allies, saying they wrongly sought to portray humanitarian groups as part of the war effort and in the process unnecessarily endangered charity workers. The organization also condemned the Afghan government for not arresting those behind the murders of the relief workers.

Mr. Bortolotti, whose book traces the organization’s development from a small group to an international institution with offices in 18 countries, says that keeping a careful balance between advocacy and providing humanitarian service has been key to the organization’s success. Just as important, staff members of the charity told Mr. Bortolotti, has been Doctors Without Borders’s emphasis on seeking private donations, rather than obtaining money from governments or the United Nations. Just 20 percent of its $400-million budget comes from the United Nations and government agencies, much less than most groups of its kind.

“We can slam the doors,” Kenny Gluck, operations director at Doctors Without Borders, tells Mr. Bortolotti. “If the governmental donors want to yank our funding, fine, we have a base of support in the public.”

While the public’s attention may be captured by the doctors the charity enlists to perform surgery as bombs explode nearby, Mr. Bortolotti’s book emphasizes that much of the organization’s work takes place not in war zones but in remote, impoverished locales.

Its 3,000 volunteers sent overseas, many of whom are not doctors but engineers, lawyers, and other professionals, do many tasks, such as providing antiretroviral treatment for people with HIV, running nutrition centers for malnourished children, transporting fresh water to tiny villages, and offering mental-health counseling to survivors of disasters and other traumas.

Included in the book are more than 60 photographs showing many aspects of the work carried out by Doctors Without Borders staff members and volunteers across the globe.