15
Aug
'It’s not the place for heroes': Starbeck nurse on life as a volunteer on the frontline of warzones
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A nurse from Starbeck has said “it’s so far removed from Bettys and the Stray”, after having been on four missions to Africa with the conflict zone charity Médecins Sans Frontières.
Andy Dennis, who is an intensive care nurse at Harrogate District Hospital, joined MSF after witnessing the work they did following the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Indonesia, which killed more than 230,000 people.
He said:
I was working in A&E on that Boxing Day and watched it unfold. I looked at the agencies going in and MSF stood out. Ten days after they launched the fundraising appeal they stopped it again – they said they had enough money, as it’s ringfenced, and if people wanted to still donate they could to the general fund. It impressed me. They put the victims at the centre, and they can deploy anywhere in the world within 48 hours.
Mr Dennis had been looking at ways to use his medical training to help charities, and decided this was the one for him.
The recruitment process was tough, and involved him having to do a tropical medicine course at the University of Liverpool then undergoing an intense interview.
He was accepted in March, and by June was in Uganda.
He said:
I was deployed to northern Uganda because of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that was creating chaos. They were vicious, taking what they wanted from towns, taking people. They would kidnap children, force them to commit atrocities against their neighbours, maybe even kill their own parents, so they couldn’t go back. Then they’d train them to be child soldiers.
Mr Dennis was sent to run medical centres in three of the camps housing displaced people from the northern regions. These three camps housed a total of around 95,000 people.
As well as being rewarding, the work was incredibly dangerous.
Mr Dennis said:
In October 2005 we had a message ‘return to base immediately’ so we did. When we got there we were told that the LRA had executed two other guys from a non-governmental organisation in the street.
At this point it was decided to send MSF volunteers home – the charity has a thorough risk assessment and security evaluation process that Mr Dennis “trusts completely”.
Mission to South Sudan
Mr Dennis’ second mission in 2009 was to South Sudan, setting up clinics along the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was a six-hour round trip from the base to the clinics, which they took each day.
He said:
There was no functional Ministry of Health – no government at all – so it was really hard. And it was just me and a midwife sent in, everyone else was national staff. The LRA killed two guys in the clinic. It’s not a place for heroics.
The real heroes in the MSF are the national staff. They know the people they’re treating, they’re looking after their neighbours. They don’t get to get on a plane and fly home to a safe country, back to their lovely home and family. That’s where they live. I once said to someone ‘it’s a different world’ and they said ‘no – it’s just different luck'.
Operating on a child with a foot abscess in South Sudan in 2009.
After his second mission, Mr Dennis felt a "horrible disconnect" and couldn't stop thinking about what was going on overseas, so he started fundraising for MSF, which is also known as Doctors Without Borders.
In 2011, he decided to do a long-distance walk between Amsterdam and Barcelona – 1,500 miles – stopping at every MSF base in Europe on the way.
His goal was to raise £9,800 but he managed £15,000.
Bicycle spoke removes tonsils
In 2013 Mr Dennis went on his next mission, again to South Sudan, this time to help at nutritional centres. The next year he went to Sierra Leone to help with the Ebola outbreak.
He said:
That was probably the most emotionally testing. The nature of the disease, the impact on the whole country, the ramifications globally. Over 11,300 people died in the outbreak [total across West Africa between 2014 and 2016].
A large part of the role is also learning about the culture. You have to understand how locals think, have national sensitivity, their mindset. Traditional healers cause a lot of problems. People have been going to healers for generations, but often they do more harm than good. There was one boy who had an infection after a healer took his tonsils out with a bicycle spoke. When the children had distended bellies they would cut lines into them, which did nothing but scar them. The traditional funeral services that were held for people who died from Ebola did nothing but spread diseases.
He expressed his frustration that despite Ebola being a recognised disease since the 70s, there was no vaccine or treatment until 2016.
Now again, with an outbreak of a different Ebola strain in the DRC, nothing has been prepared and “teams there are now dealing with exactly the same things we did in 2014”.
Mr Dennis hasn’t been on a mission since 2014, but has been advocating and fundraising – now having raised a total of £168,995.
He said:
I try to keep things that have fallen out of the news in people’s mind. I would be out on mission in the DRC right now but I don’t know French. I would be out in a shot if they wanted me.
Andy and his wife Tracey cycled from Amsterdam to Gibraltar.
Ethical fundraising
After meeting his now wife, Tracey, who is also a nurse, in 2012, he convinced her to join in his fundraising efforts, cycling across America.
In 2022 they cycled from Amsterdam to Gibraltar, raising £25,000, and have plans for more fundraising in the near future.
Mr Dennis said:
It’s really important to know that all the fundraising activities we do are self-funded – every penny of the money donated goes to MSF. We wild camp while cycling, surrounded with wild animals and washing in streams. It’s very liberating.
I try to be ethical in my fundraising, like MSF are. For example, I turn down sponsorship from companies that allow animal cruelty. MSF turn down money all the time if it’s not an ethical source – say if it’s a pharmaceutical company or weapons manufacturer.
The next thing on Mr Dennis’s fundraising calendar is the Burlesque Bonanza, taking place at the Manhattan Club in Oatlands in October. The last time this event was held it raised £2,000 for MSF.
If you want to donate to the MSF through Mr Dennis, visit his fundraising page here.
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