Lee Roebeck, Doctors without Borders and Peace Fellowships

Last Week

Lee Roebeck talked to us about humility and told us a lot of interesting stories about his family.

What was particularly interesting was his knowledge and admiration for the Four-way Test.

He is, in many ways, an aspirant motivational speaker.  He really believes that you are able to influence people for the better and is working hard at it.

I suppose we were guinea pigs, in a way.



This Week

Our speaker this week is Kwanele Ndlovu who is the Donor Development Coordinator for Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders.
She seems to be bringing a whole team along!

MSF is a fantastic organisation...see below.
I just hope she is not coming just to ask for money.



Amid the Parisian upheavals of May 1968, a group of young doctors decided to go and help victims of wars and major disasters. This new brand of humanitarianism would reinvent the concept of emergency aid. They were to become Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), known internationally in English as Doctors Without Borders.

Medics in Emergencies  For a number of years, Max Recamier and Pascal Greletty-Bosviel—volunteer doctors with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva—had been regularly intervening in armed conflicts.  "Contrary to popular belief, the Red Cross is not a medical organization at all," says Max Recamier. "Pascal and myself were the only two doctors they knew because of our previous mission in Yemen, so they asked us to find some doctors for the ICRC. The first one to volunteer was Bernard Kouchner, who was much younger than I was; he was just finishing his studies and hadn't even finished his thesis yet, but he volunteered to go over there."

A team of six set off on the ICRC mission to Biafra: two doctors—Max Recamier and Bernard Kouchner—as well as two clinicians and two nurses. Being thrown into such a bloody conflict was a real shock for these fledgling doctors, who found themselves having to provide war surgery in hospitals that were regularly targeted by the Nigerian armed forces.  Recamier and Kouchner believed the world needed to know about the events they w ere witnessing: civilians being murdered and starved by blockading forces. They openly criticized the Nigerian government and the Red Cross for their seemingly complicit behavior.  In the following three years, other doctors began to speak up. These doctors, or "Biafrans," as they were known, began to lay the foundations for a new and questioning form of humanitarianism that would ignore political or religious boundaries, and prioritize the welfare of those suffering.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) opened the Kgomotso care centre to provide emergency medical and psychosocial care to victims of sexual violence in Rustenburg, a large town in the ‘Platinum Belt’ mining area of South Africa.In Rustenburg, with one in three women report having been raped at some point in their life.
Since the project opened, MSF health promotion teams have spoken to over 25,000 adults and high school students about sexual and gender-based violence. MSF aims to use this project as a model for providing comprehensive care for victims of sexual violence in South Africa, and to advocate for a primary care-level response run by nurses and psychologists instead of a centralised physician-led service.
Raising public awareness and encouraging women to break their silence is also extremely important, as the preliminary results of an MSF survey show that up to 30 per cent of women do not seek medical care after a sexual assault.

Emergency intervention in Durban
In April, an emergency team from our Eshowe project responded to an outbreak of xenophobic violence in the coastal city of Durban.Over 7,000 migrants, mainly Malawians, Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Congolese and Burundians, fled and sought refuge in three hastily erected displacement camps.MSF provided medical care, psychosocial counselling, water and sanitation logistics, and helped coordinate the response with other organisations like the International Committee of the Red Cross and the UN Refugee Agency.
Stop Stock Outs 
The Stop Stock Outs Project (SSP) is a civil society initiative in which MSF, in collaboration with other organisations, monitors availability of essential drugs in clinics across the country, engages with health authorities to monitor stock outs, and pushes for shortages to be resolved more quickly.  Published at the 7th SA AIDS Conference in Durban in July, the second SSP report revealed that one in four clinics surveyed experienced shortages of medicines, thereby confirming that drug stock outs are a threat to public health and could undermine the progress made in South Africa’s antiretroviral (ARV) programme, which is the largest in the world, reaching over 3 million patients.

Here's a little information about Peace Fellowships as we have a candidate.
PEACE FELLOWSHIPS

WHAT ARE ROTARY PEACE FELLOWSHIPS?

Each year, Rotary selects up to 100 individuals from around the world to receive fully funded academic fellowships at one of our peace centers. These fellowships cover tuition and fees, room and board, round-trip transportation, and all internship and field-study expenses. 

In just over a decade, the Rotary Peace Centers have trained more than 900 fellows for careers in peace building. Many of them go on to serve as leaders in national governments, NGOs, the military, law enforcement, and international organizations like the United Nations and World Bank.

Check out the Rotary Peace Map to see where our alumni are creating positive change.

Two types of peace fellowships are available.

MASTER'S DEGREE

We offer master’s degree fellowships at premier universities in fields related to peace and conflict prevention and resolution. Programs last 15 to 24 months and require a practical internship of two to three months during the academic break. Each year, we award up to 50 master’s degree fellowships at these institutions:

• Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA (fact sheet)
• International Christian University, Japan (fact sheet)
• University of Bradford, England (fact sheet)
• University of Queensland, Australia (fact sheet)
• Uppsala University, Sweden (fact sheet)

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT CERTIFICATE

For experienced professionals working in peace-related fields who want to enhance their professional skills, we offer a three-month program in peace and conflict prevention and resolution at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand (fact sheet). This program incorporates two to three weeks of field study. We award up to 50 certificates each year.