Long Live The Sar

Hard to believe I've been working here for six days already. Unlike an ED shift where volumes ebb and flow throughout the day, patients line up in the morning before we arrive and are then shuffled around the clinic until we see our last patients around 3:45PM. Similar to the ER, there's always someone else to see. For starters, it was not easy to find an organization to volunteer with in a refugee camp. Naively, I thought it would be easy to find volunteer opportunities with organizations doing this type of work. I found a handful, emailed them, and none got back to me. So I sent another email, and then a third email. Finally I made a phone call and only after that did I hear back. And these were the organizations that returned my calls at all. I ended up signing on with MedGlobal after hearing many good reviews from fellow emergency docs. In Bangladesh, MedGlobal is working with OBAT Helpers and a local partner, Prantic Unnayan Society , to staff an outpatient clinic in ...

It has been a successful whirlwind jumping headfirst into work in the refugee camp and I want to share some of my initial impressions. 1) The scale of the Kutupalong refugee camp is overwhelming 2) So is the level of development 3) The medical problems are real but ... many are related to social stressors 1 - The refugee camp is massive. We are on a hilltop near the edge of sectors 4 and 17 overlooking the sector 4 expansion . The original refugee camp land was reportedly government owned national forest land that used to host monkees, herds of Asian elephants, and lots of other wildlife. As the refugee population has grown, the impenetrable jungle-clad steep hills are clear-cut, the animals have been pushed out (though many refugees are still scared of an elephant possibly wandering into camp), and ordered chaos emerges. From our clinic, we can see a new camp sector being built with right-angled rows of houses, hundreds of refugee workers wearing neon orange vests filli...