Committed to making the world a better place to live
Guilhem Molinie, general director of Doctors Without Borders Southern Africa, prepares teams to go into the field
Tell me about Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) and its work.
MSF is the world’s leading emergency medical humanitarian organisation. Responding to crises and emergencies is in its DNA. Everything we do is about responding fast, with appropriate care and services, to help people whose lives are in danger.
What do you do each day?
One of the big priorities of MSF is to be informed and prepared. The more prepared you are, the quicker you can react. So my everyday work in Johannesburg is about ensuring this preparation throughout Southern Africa. The people we need on our team have to be well-trained and mentally prepared for what they will experience when working in, for example, a refugee camp in Bangladesh with Rohingya refugees, or a maternity ward in the Central African Republic.
What are some of the issues you deal with in Southern Africa?
We are still mainly focused on the consequences of the HIV epidemic. While millions of South Africans have gained access to HIV tests and life-saving treatment over the past 15 years, today we focus mainly on those who can’t access it. We also focus more and more on treating advanced-stage HIV and complicated forms of tuberculosis, often linked with HIV.
How did you end up doing this work?
I’m from a generation that woke up as young adults during the war in Bosnia and the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s.
I could not close my eyes while the world was being torn apart. I had a chance to visit my girlfriend, who was running a small HIV project in the mountains of West Papua in Indonesia in the late ’90s. I saw what she was able to do with the community, and I decided to join the global “battle”. I abandoned a PhD in political sciences and did a year of practical training.
What did you want to become when you were a child?
A journalist, because I liked hearing stories from people. I lived in a small town in France, but listening to the world news was fascinating. I wanted to travel, and wanted to tell others the truth of what was happening. So working with MSF, which was formed both by doctors and journalists who aimed to bring medical care and bear witness, is very near to this childhood dream.
What do you find most meaningful about the work you do?
There’s nothing more meaningful than to be able to help a person get medical care — free in all MSF projects — help them recover and start them on a path to find some hope. I’ve seen so many people served by clinics or hospitals. This is what counts for me.
What makes you suited to your work?
First, probably because of my ideas about humankind and unity — ubuntu on a global scale. But also having a mix of a relatively broad classical education, as well as practical training, and, perhaps most valuable, a diverse working experience in different positions in several countries.
I like to learn. And you need to be humble — to know you can learn something from a child, from a migrant worker, from a person living on the streets, from a person you intend to rescue. I’m also practical. Working in conflict settings, I focus on solutions, not on who’s right or wrong.