Mohamed Sandi signed up to fight malaria
Mohamed Sandi, a carpenter, rips open a packet of latex gloves, dons them and pricks the finger of Massah, a two-year-old girl with a fever.
A droplet of blood is placed in a paracheck, a malaria test kit similar in appearance to an off-the-shelf pregnancy test. He keeps looking at his battered digital watch. “She’s positive,” he says after 15 minutes.
By then Massah has forgotten the sting of the lancet and snatches the foil-enclosed strip of anti-malarials from Sandi’s hand as if they were sweets.
Sandi is one of some 140 community malaria volunteers (CMV), trained by Doctors Without Borders (DWB) to diagnose and treat malaria.
He also knows which patients to refer to a clinic, among them pregnant women.
“Sometimes a person is very weak and at times they are bleeding from their nose and I send them to the clinic,” he says.
By the end of next year the number of CMVs will double to nearly 300, as the project has been highly successful.
“Malaria was very plentiful here, at times maybe seven or eight per week, but it is better now,” Sandi says.
“I’m not a doctor, but people in the village call me doctor.”
Anyone can be a CMV as long as they are committed and literate — writing journals and collecting statistical data are vital parts of the job. In return for their voluntary work, other villagers supply the CMVs with food and help them tend to their gardens.
The most severe cases end up at the Gondama Referral Center, a DWB-run hospital outside Bo, the second-largest city in Sierra Leone. The GRC provides free health care for children and expecting mothers.
“A Caesarian section at the government hospital is $100 and it’s impossible for the patients to pay,” explains Noemie Larsimont, the Belgian doctor responsible for the GRC.
Guest editor James Blunt: “They should be celebrated”
I was a reconnaissance officer in the British army in the Kosovo conflict of 1999. As such, I was the eyes and ears of my commanders, sending ahead to give them information about what their main formations might encounter as they advanced. As the Vanguard, we thought we were doing a tough job, but on numerous occasions we would run into a hut or shed in the middle of nowhere with a queue of civilians waiting to see the doctor inside. These doctors and nurses were volunteers from all over the world who were selflessly risking their safety to bring medical attention to the civilian victims of man-made or natural disasters. In a celebrity-obsessed world, I clearly remember thinking that these are the people who should be celebrated.
Today in the Democratic Republic of Congo, DWB teams are working to meet the immense humanitarian needs of hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced by renewed fighting in the North Kivu region of Eastern DRC and are living in extremely precarious conditions. The teams are providing water and sanitation services, life saving surgical support, and primary medical care to people injured in the fighting or who have been uprooted and have fled for their lives.
Even at a time of financial crisis, people uprooted by war and conflict and those affected by disease and malnutrition remain just as vulnerable and in need of assistance. That is why it is vital that we maintain support to those in desperate need right now. Doctors Without Borders relies on the generosity of individuals to carry out its essential life-saving work.
Contributions can be made online at 
www.doctorswithoutborders.org