These days, I always utter the words, ‘Médecins Sans Frontières’ with a proud French accent. It was established by French doctors in 1971 by French doctors who had experienced the horror of Nigeria’s Biafra war in the late 1960s. To be honest, I didn’t know much about MSF until a couple of year ago, when the Haiti earthquake struck.
I saw how MSF was actively involved and when I dug deeper, was struck by how it employs the full gamut of professionalism in humanitarian action all over the world. For me, it is the epitome of a professionally run humanitarian organization. If you try and remove MSF from all the places where it is in the world, the resultant gap is too grave to imagine. I shudder at the thought.
I have recently been honored to undertake translation work for MSF. This involved Translation and Proofreading of about 6, 000 words within 7 days during the just past Christmas festivity. The content was about MSF and its history in Kenya with some information on several diseases prevalent in this region.
This project was a lot of fun even though it had some style sheet related challenges. But in the end, we managed to reconcile our respective style sheets and come up with quality translation. It was quite rewarding to handle this assignment because of the admiration that I had for MSF’s work over the years. There is something special about an organization that seeks to alleviate human suffering and does so consistently.