For decades, Doctors Without Borders has been admired for bringing desperately needed medical care to crises around the globe and pioneering modern-day humanitarian aid. It’s an organization with radical roots, promising to do whatever it takes to deliver lifesaving care to people in need. But now, it’s struggling to address institutional racism.
The organization, also known by its French acronym MSF, has about 63,000 people working in 88 countries. While foreign doctors parachuting into crisis zones get most of the attention, 90% of the work is done by local health workers.
In the summer of 2020, more than 1,000 current and former staffers wrote a letter calling out institutional racism at MSF. They say MSF operates a two-tiered system that favors foreign doctors, or expat doctors, over local health workers.
On the eve of MSF’s 50th anniversary, reporters Mara Kardas-Nelson, Ngozi Cole and Sean Campbell talked to about 100 current and former MSF workers to investigate how deep these issues run. We meet Dr. Indira Govender, a South African doctor who in 2011 accepted what she thought was her dream job with MSF in South Africa, only to get a front-row seat to the organization’s institutional racism. Even though she’s officially the second-in-command of her project, she says it feels like a select group of European expats and White South Africans are running the show.
Then, Kardas-Nelson and Cole take us inside the inequities MSF staffers experienced during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. While expat doctors had their meals together and socialized, local health workers were left out. But inequities ran deeper. If expat doctors got sick, they would be evacuated out of the country, while local workers didn’t get that care – they were treated at the same center where they worked. Kardas-Nelson and Cole reported the story from Sierra Leone in the spring of 2021 and spoke to former national MSF clinicians.
Finally, we talk about what can change in humanitarian aid. Govender is part of a group of current and former MSF workers called Decolonize MSF. While she and others are pushing the organization to commit to changes that address racial inequities, some are skeptical about what will actually change.
This week’s episode was created in partnership with the global news site Insider.
Dig Deeper
Credits
Lead reporter: Mara Kardas-Nelson | Reporters: Ngozi Cole and Sean Campbell | Editors: Queena Kim and Brett Myers | Lead producer: Katharine Mieszkowski | Producer: Pamela Kirkland
Original score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda, with help from Steven Rascón and Claire Mullen | Production manager: Amy Mostafa | Digital producer: Sarah Mirk | Episode photo: Ngozi Cole | Executive producer: Kevin Sullivan | Host: Al Letson
Special thanks: John Cook at Insider, Ariya Ahrary and Daniel Gross.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Speaker 1: | Support comes from Russell Reynolds Associates. Call them changemakers, call them rule breakers, we call them redefineres. Join host, Nanaz Mohtahami and CEO Clarke Murphy as they engage in purposeful conversations with leaders in and out of the business world who share their insights and perspectives on how they lead boldly. Fresh ideas and tangible takeaways, redefine your own leadership trajectory no matter where you are in your journey. Listen to Redefiners wherever you get your podcasts. |
| Speaker 1: | Reveal is brought to you by Progressive. Are you thinking more about how to tighten up your budget these days? Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save over $700 on average and customers can qualify for an average of six discounts when they sign up. A little off your rate each month goes a long way. Get a quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National annual average insurance savings by new customers surveyed in 2020. Potential savings will vary, discounts vary and are not available in all and situations. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal, I’m Al Letson. |
| Speaker 3: | Medecins San Frontieres meaning Doctors Without Borders is an international humanitarian aid organization that provides emergency medical assistance to people in crisis. |
| Al Letson: | Doctors Without Borders. If you’ve heard of this global aid organization, right now you’re probably picturing foreign doctors parachuting into conflicts and crises around the globe to deliver desperately needed medical care. |
| Speaker 3: | Doctors, surgeons, drivers, administrators, logisticians, nurses. |
| Al Letson: | But a lot of that work, 90% of it, is done by locals or so-called national staff. People like Indira Govender. I |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | I was offered the job and was really excited. |
| Al Letson: | It’s 2011, Indira is 30 years old and going to be deputy medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders mission in South Africa. She’s going to be their number two person in charge. Doctors Without Borders pioneered modern-day humanitarian aid and is one of the most famous of these organizations. Today, it has about 63,000 people working in 88 countries with an annual budget of $2.25 billion. Anyway, when Indira gets the offer, she’s already a doctor just finishing up her graduate degree in public health. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | I was going to leave my old job the next day and start this new job at MSF, which was really awesome that it kind of all happened together. |
| Al Letson: | I should say outside the US, Doctors Without Borders is usually called by its French acronym, MSF for Med Sans Frontieres. Working at Doctors Without Borders is Indira’s dream job. For nearly a decade she watched HIV spread across South Africa and fast with drug prices so high they’re out of reach for the vast majority of the population. And while the government fails to respond, millions of people are infected and tens of thousands die each year. So MSF teams up with local activist groups and brings the into the country. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | People were then taking the antiretrovirals and experiencing what they call a Lazarus effect, where they would literally recover. So that really won a lot of support and changed mindsets. And it got this critical mass of people committed to fighting HIV. |
| Al Letson: | They helped change the conversation around HIV across South Africa and the world. And this is exactly what MSF was founded to do back in the seventies. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | They transcended borders, they transcended race and nationality and ethnicity. |
| Al Letson: | It’s an organization with radical roots that’s willing to offend governments and break the rules to deliver lifesaving care. These crusading doctors aren’t afraid to play hardball. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | I was really wide-eyed and excited to be there. This is an opportunity of a lifetime. |
| Al Letson: | Indira was born and raised in South Africa. She’s a person of color. Hiring her was a part of a larger movement within MSF. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | I was part of a plan to bring in national staff as deputies to senior managers. |
| Al Letson: | Around the world, MSF is trying to bring more national staff into positions of power. The organization is responding to criticisms that locals are stuck in subservient roles and Indira is so ready to be a part of that change, but she keeps thinking about this strange moment at her graduation. One of her parents’ friends was there. He’s a big wig, the former Dean of her medical school. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | And so he had heard obviously that I was going to start this job at MSF and he didn’t really say much. |
| Al Letson: | He didn’t seem excited for her, but he did say something that stuck with her. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | So he just said to me that they will never allow a South African to manage that project. They will never let anyone from the country manage it. The boss is always from Europe. |
| Al Letson: | But she doesn’t really let that bother her. And she launches into her work, caring for people with tuberculosis and HIV. They’re refugees and migrant workers living in abandoned buildings in Johannesburg and people in the most remote, rural areas of Lesotho. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | It was incredible work. And they were having amazing outcomes that were being applauded all over the world. |
| Al Letson: | About eight months after Indira takes the position, a new staff member joins a team. He’s from Belgium and he’s managing part of the Lesotho project. One day, he starts going off about this local staffer. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | This man was just really speaking in a very insulting manner about her, talking about how she’s lazy and she doesn’t work. And she sits at her desk all day and they’ve seen her reading magazines and I was like, what? |
| Al Letson: | Because Indira has met this woman. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | She was quite a smart young woman who was very dignified and conscientious in her work. |
| Al Letson: | A few days later in June of 2012, she flies to Brussels for a big meeting at one of MSF’s headquarters. There are photos of MSF’s work all around, doctors helping babies, things like that. And this meeting is in a big boardroom overlooking the city. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | I was the only South African and the only person of color in that room. |
| Al Letson: | And they’re doing some planning for the South African mission. You know, talking about the staff they’ll need and how many hours the work will take. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | And all of a sudden this MSF doctor has an outburst. He just starts ranting about how lazy South Africans are and how none of us work or we don’t like to work. We’re so lazy. All we want to know is what we are going to get out of it, how much we going to get paid. I was just completely like god smacked, if that’s a word. I think that incident was probably the first time that I got hit in the face by the racist brick in the organization. |
| Al Letson: | The man who Indira says made the disparaging remarks, oh, he denies it. By the time they get back to Cape Town, Indira’s rose-colored glasses have come off. Even though there are other national staff in positions of power, Indira is more aware than ever that it’s a select group of expats and white South Africans who are really running the show. And even though she’s officially second in command, Indira is left out of important conversations. She says many of those took place after hours, among expats who were friends with each other. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | We were like tokens. We were just like the black faces at the front of the shop, but we were not actually the owners of the shop. |
| Al Letson: | When Indira brings up issues of race and equity with her boss, she says he doesn’t take it seriously. She remembers those conversations when something like- |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | Why are you complaining? You’re not even oppressed. |
| Al Letson: | In an email, he remembers them having “vivid and interesting discussions on many subjects, including race relations in South Africa and beyond.” MSF’s grand plan had been for nationals like Indira to head its projects, but it becomes clear to her, that isn’t going to happen. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | It just failed. It failed. |
| Al Letson: | Eventually she resigns. When Indira leaves, MSF replaces her with an expat. But Indira doesn’t make a clean break. She keeps thinking about this MSF doctor she met on one of her trips to Lesotho. She was giving out HIV meds from a mud hut on top of a mountain. Patients were lined up outside. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | I was completely amazed at how she was able to do this. And you know, MSF, with all their resources had brought this doctor to Lesotho. I was quite inspired by that. |
| Al Letson: | And Indira thinks, why not go back to my roots. Clearly I can’t make an impact in this organization as a manager, but maybe I can as a doctor and maybe I’ll get more respect if I work overseas as an expat. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | There’s this literally cognitive dissonance in your own mind over how to make sense of this. |
| Al Letson: | On the one hand, Indira believes in MSF’s mission. On the other hand, she knows what she experienced. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | And it takes a while before you can reflect on it and articulate it and actually empower yourself to say, Hey, this is what happened to me and it was real to me, and it’s a problem. |
| Al Letson: | A big one. Last summer, current and former Doctors Without Border staffers, more than a thousand of them, wrote a letter at naming the problem, institutional racism. |
| Speaker 5: | Worldwide mobilization against racism has reached a Nobel Peace Prize-winning aid organization, Doctors Without Borders. That organization- |
| Al Letson: | The letter says, despite grappling with this problem for years, racism and white supremacy still shape the culture and mindset at Doctors Without Borders. It goes on to say that the organization remains defined by the white European expert and the distant other in need. |
| Al Letson: | This problem isn’t limited to MSF, it plagues humanitarian organizations around the globe. On the Eve of MSF’s 50th anniversary, we’re going to investigate how deep these issues run. To do it, we teamed up with a global news site Insider and with reporters, Mara Kardas- Nelson, Ngozi Cole, and Sean Campbell. They interviewed around a hundred current and former staffers around the world and reviewed thousands of pages of documents during the course of their investigation. Mara and Ngozi worked in global health and Mara even worked for MSF about a decade ago. She met Indira then. |
| Al Letson: | When we come back, Indira goes to west Africa to help fight the world’s largest Ebola outbreak. That’s next on Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. |
| Speaker 1: | Support for Reveal comes from Odoo. Odoo’s suite of business apps has everything you need to run a company. Think of your smartphone with all your apps right at your fingertips, Odoo is just like that for business. But instead of an app to order take out or tell you the weather, you have sales, inventory, accounting, and more. You name the department, they’ve got it covered and they are all connected. Join the 6 million Odoo users who stopped wasting time and started getting stuff done. Go to odoo.com/reveal to start a free trial. That’s O-D-O-O.com/reveal. |
| Speaker 1: | It’s the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11th. But Dan Taberski isn’t interested in that day. He wants to talk about what happened the next day and every day after that. In his new podcast, 9/12, Dan tells the stories of a series of characters whose lives would never be the same after September 11th. And through them, we begin to realize that there are new lessons to be learned and that we just might have enough distance now from 9/11 to make sense of some things we couldn’t understand before. Stick around to the end of this episode, to hear preview of 9/12. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal I’m Al Letson. It’s October 2014, West Africa is in the middle of the biggest Ebola outbreak in history. |
| Speaker 6: | There are dozens of new cases every day in Sierra Leone. Officials say so may many people are dying of Ebola, that dealing with their bodies is becoming a problem. A quarantine zone has been imposed around one area known as the gateway to the capital, Free Town, but the disease is still spreading. |
| Al Letson: | Ebola spreads through sweat, blood, and saliva, and the health systems in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia are collapsing. About a year before the outbreak Indira Govender had left her job at Doctors Without Borders in her home country, South Africa. She was a part of the national staff there, that’s what the organization calls its local workforce. She quit because she felt disrespected, but Indira still really believed in Doctors Without Borders lifesaving mission and she was impressed by its work on Ebola. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | MSF was the only organization that had the knowhow and the resources to go and build a treatment center in the middle of the jungle and save lives. |
| Al Letson: | MSF, again, is the French acronym for Doctors Without Borders. And when the organization asked Indira to go to Sierra Leone, she said yes. Now she would be an expat, a foreign doctor going into a crisis zone. Reporters Mara Kardas-Nelson and Ngozi Cole know a lot about this world. Mara is an American and Ngozi is from Sierra Leone. Both of them worked in global health for years, including in West Africa. Mara even worked for MSF in South Africa about a decade ago, Mara starts us off. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | When Indira arrived in Sierra Leone it was evening. The next morning she was driven east to Kailahun, the center of the outbreak. Indira spent the whole day in the car. She remembers the vast jungles, these huge expanses of palm trees and snaking vines and the sounds of birds everywhere. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | Our ETC was literally carved out of the jungle. |
| Ngozi Cole: | She’s talking about MSF’s Ebola treatment center. Sick people of come across the country were taken there. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | Patients would be packed into an ambulance and driven for hours on the dirt roads. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Indira wrote in her journal that first day. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | The team is wonderful. People are calm, collected, and serious. It’s good to be here. |
| Ngozi Cole: | One of the people on Indira’s team was Kenny [foreign language]. |
| Speaker 9: | [Kenny] means, in our tribe, mister or elderly somebody that you have to acknowledge or respect. So in the Mende tribe, we call Kenny [foreign language] or daddy. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Kenny had just graduated with what would be the equivalent of a physician’s assistant degree in the US. And he’d heard that MSF had opened an Ebola treatment center in Kailahun, his home district. |
| Speaker 9: | So I decided to myself that I should help my people. |
| Ngozi Cole: | But first Kenny needed to get to the treatment center. He’s 260 miles away in Free Town, and there’s a quarantine. Cars aren’t allowed on the road. You’ll hear him here, speaking in Krio, the main language in Sierra Leone. |
| Speaker 9: | [foreign language] |
| Ngozi Cole: | Kenny says he found a truck bringing rice from the capital to the rural areas and convinces the driver to pretend he’s helping out. |
| Speaker 9: | [foreign language] |
| Ngozi Cole: | When he finally arrives, MSF has Kenny. It’s his first big job out of university. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Like most the staff, Kenny and Indira spent their days going in and out of the red zone, the area where really sick and really infectious patients are cared for. |
| Speaker 9: | As we can see, he’s now taking off the [inaudible]. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | This is from a video one of their colleagues took on his phone. It’s at the treatment center. He’s recording them taking off their PPE safely. |
| Speaker 9: | Take off your goggles. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Because Ebola is so infectious, every inch of their body has to be covered. |
| Speaker 9: | Be careful, wash your hand please. Take off your goggles. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Kenny and Indira often go into the red zone together, doing the same kind of work. Kenny takes one side of the room, Indira the other. And sometimes Kenny translates for her since she can’t speak Krio. It’s the early days of the outbreak and MSF is really worried about their staff getting Ebola so some clinicians don’t feel comfortable giving IVs even though patients can die of dehydration, but Indira and Kenny Musa decide to do it anyway. |
| Speaker 10: | As we see Musa and- |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Here’s that video from their colleague again. |
| Speaker 10: | Just coming from the treatment center, I think they went for IV infusion. Now they’re here as we can see a South Africa dynamic lady. Yeah, yeah. They do two IVs. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | They were taking a risk, but Indira thought it was worth it. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | So I went in and I started putting up drips and it made a small difference. At least people were not dying dehydration. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | For the most part though, patient care is limited. There’s only so much they can do. Kenny and Indira give patients food and water, keep their fevers low and make them as comfortable as possible. Indira says sometimes all they can do is move two beds closer to each other. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | So that the two relatives that were lying on those beds dying of Ebola could hold hands or something. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | In the red zone Indira and Kenny are living the same experience, but outside of that zone, after they take off their PPE, that changes. Indira’s life in Sierra Leone revolves around the guest house. MSF rented out the best lodging in Kailahun. All of Indira’s meals come from there. Breakfast and dinner are served before and after work. Even her lunch is delivered to the treatment center. When it arrives, the national staff noticed that the expats go off and eat together. Indira says, yeah, that happened. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | And that was never addressed. And you know, maybe it was just something that happens with people in groups and that everyone just kind of gravitates towards their community. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Because Ebola is so infectious, MSF has a strict no-touch policy. Staff members aren’t supposed to touch anyone without PPE. |
| Ngozi Cole: | But while workers like Indira are living in their expat bubble, Kenny and other national staff aren’t. Kenny has to find his own lunch and that often means leaving the treatment center. It’s a hassle and it also puts him in a situation where he might have to touch people. That’s a huge infection risk. He complains to MSF a few times, but he says, they tell him there’s a small stipend in his salary to cover it. One day, Kenny is so hungry after working in the red zone that he eats a plate of food from the center. And he says, an expat starts yelling at him. |
| Speaker 9: | I said, for God’s sake. He says, not human. |
| Ngozi Cole: | Can you remember saying, for God’s sake, I’m human? |
| Speaker 9: | Very, very hot. You get for sweat a lot. |
| Ngozi Cole: | He says, it gets so hot inside the PPE that he sweats a lot and he burns energy and he gets really hungry. Kenny says the expat threatens to fire him. |
| Speaker 9: | I said, so if I eat this [inaudible] |
| Ngozi Cole: | One of Kenny’s colleagues, Gloria Bunda remembers that even the water supply was separate. When she asked an expat, if she could bring some of the water in the fridge, she was told that- |
| Gloria Bunda: | “This is not for you, it’s for the patients and for us.” |
| Ngozi Cole: | Gloria says she told me that the water is not for you, it’s for us, meaning expats and the patients. |
| Gloria Bunda: | [inaudible] prepared you guys. Why you are coming to work, you don’t come with water. |
| Ngozi Cole: | Indira, who is now an expat doesn’t remember it the same way. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | So there was a fridge, but it was not full with drinks for expats. We brought our water from the guest house. |
| Ngozi Cole: | [inaudible], being a national staff member, Indira understands how a divided workplace colors everything, even the water. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | That’s an example of where a perception exists and nobody addresses it and it takes on a life of its own. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Pay is also an issue. Kenny, who’s basically a physician’s assistant is making around $360 a month. Indira, who’s an MD, is making four times as much for doing the same kind of work. That’s significant. In the US, doctors typically make about twice as much as PAs. And as an expat, Indira also gets a daily allowance on top of her salary. Expats live totally different lives than national staff. At the end of the day, when Indira gets off work, she gets into a big white Land Rover to be driven home. Indira says some evenings she would sit in the courtyard and have a drink. Kenny remembers popping by the guest house once. He noticed the expats were hanging out, barbecuing chicken, it was like a completely different world. |
| Speaker 9: | They should have invited some of us and they never did that onc so I felt left out. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Indira had left Sierra Leone by then, but she doesn’t think the expats were trying to be exclusive or anything. It’s just that the guest house was closed to anyone who didn’t live there because of that no-touch policy. But it’s not lost on Indira that Kenny’s being left out. Indira remembered that feeling when expats in South Africa would socialize after hours and end up making work decisions without her. |
| Ngozi Cole: | When national staff got off work, there was no Land Rover. They have to find their own way home. Kenny usually took a motorcycle taxi, despite MSF’s no-touch policy. When he got home, like many of the national staff, he was shunned. People assumed he was bringing Ebola with him. |
| Speaker 9: | Some of us lost relationship because of our job. Some of us, we lost good friends. |
| Ngozi Cole: | Kenny was one of those who lost his relationship. All the national staff were kicked out of their apartment. |
| Speaker 9: | Even the family members. They were so scared the rate at which our colleagues are dying. So because of this, it created a lot of stigmatization for us. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | And if the workers at the treatment center did get sick, they would be treated differently. If Indira got sick, MSF would evacuate her out of the country where her chances of survival would be good. National staff who got Ebola were treated in the same center where they worked. I asked Kenny about this. Was that a good thing that they were admitted to the same facility? |
| Speaker 9: | For me, it was actually demotivation because the segregation was there clearly. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Kenny helped to treat national staff who got sick with Ebola at MSF’s facility. Some of them died. In a written response, MSF says they offer medical care to national staff based on national laws and availability of care in country and that they have a different level responsibility to people on international assignments. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | We’re focusing on MSF because it’s one of the biggest players in global health and because more than a thousand current and former staff signed that letter last summer demanding change. But this two-tiered system is baked into a lot of global health organizations and some say it’s directly linked to colonialism. Many of the early Western hospitals in Africa were set up by missionaries. That language has endured. Even though MSF is not a religious organization, it sends out expats on “missions”. |
| Ngozi Cole: | MSF says its mandate is to provide medical care where it’s needed most. And it says national staff are paid according to minimum pay requirements for the countries where they work. But critics say that MSF is exploiting labor conditions in these countries. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | And look, it’s really complicated. Foreign doctors already take pay cuts to work for MSF. If they made local salaries and had to live like locals, they might not come to Sierra Leone at all. |
| Ngozi Cole: | But 90% of their workforce is national staff and people in the global health community are asking, should organizations like MSF and others reinforce existing inequalities or be part of changing them? Something happened in Sierra Leone during the Ebola crisis that brought all of these issues to head. |
| Speaker 6: | The worst Ebola outbreak in history continues to rage in West Africa. And the chief doctor in the area has contracted the deadly disease. |
| Ngozi Cole: | Chief doctor was Sheik Umar Khan, a legend in Sierra Leone. He was one of the first doctors to treat Ebola patients in the country. When Ebola broke out, he trained hundreds of clinicians, including Kenny and many other national staff who later worked for MSF. He was kind of like Dr. Fauci of Ebola, one of the key leaders fighting the epidemic. |
| Dan Bausch: | He was kind of excited to do things and very decisive and he really wanted to do it, he really wanted to plunge in. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Dan Bausch is a doctor and a leading expert in global health. He worked alongside Dr. Khan in Sierra Leone. When Dan found out that Dr. Khan tested positive and that he was being seen at MSF’s treatment center, he and other giants in global health sprung into action. They asked the World Health Organization to medevac Dr. Khan out of Sierra Leone. That was routine for international medical staff. At first, the WHO said no. And by the time the organization agreed, it was too late. They also pushed MSF to give Dr. Khan an experimental and promising treatment called ZNAP, but MSF said, no. They said it wouldn’t be fair. |
| Dan Bausch: | What they termed equity and social justice, that you had many, many people every day who were coming down with Ebola who were not getting offered an experimental therapeutic. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Dan didn’t buy it. He says doctors make decisions about who should live and die all the time. |
| Dan Bausch: | To be very frank, if it was an MSF worker who had fallen sick, someone who had come into the country from outside- |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Meaning an expat. |
| Dan Bausch: | I think that that person would’ve been offered the drug. |
| Ngozi Cole: | That’s basically what happened. A few days after Dr. Khan died another organization flew ZNAP from Sierra Leone to Liberia. It was used to treat two white American relief workers. Both lived. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Dan says that Dr. Khan’s death was a watershed moment. It’s become a textbook example of inequality in global health. |
| Dan Bausch: | And so I think in many ways, that is his legacy. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | It’s been almost six years since the Ebola outbreak ended. And we went to Kailahun to see how Kenny and other national staff are doing. |
| Speaker 9: | The road is still bad as the way it used to be. |
| Ngozi Cole: | We drove to the sites of MSF’s old treatment center. |
| Speaker 9: | We are now close to the camp. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | A few miles outside of town, the paved road turns into gravel and we enter a jungle. Bushes and trees reach towards us from all sides. |
| Speaker 9: | I think we are here. We can get out of the vehicle. |
| Ngozi Cole: | You can still see some concrete slabs, old latex gloves, but really it’s just forest. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Kenny and some other former MSF staff show us around. He points to where the ambulances and the Land Rovers would park. |
| Speaker 9: | We have a very big space for car park. |
| Ngozi Cole: | And where the expats at lunch. |
| Speaker 9: | This is where the expats take lunch. |
| Ngozi Cole: | Gloria Bunda, who was a nurse at the treatment center, teases him. |
| Gloria Bunda: | What about you? Where you take your lunch? There? |
| Speaker 9: | I will not part of [crosstalk] |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | They’re excited to show us where they worked and what they did every day. They know they helped to save many lives. |
| Ngozi Cole: | But they also say they feel left behind and forgotten. At the end of the Ebola outbreak, national staff say they were finally invited to the guest house. They hoped after a year of grueling work with low pay MSF might reward them. Workers tell us they hope they might get a severance check. Instead, they say they were each given a certificate and a big white bucket, gloves, and soap. |
| Speaker 9: | I’m saying this, if Ebola enters [inaudible] |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Kenny says that if MSF were to come back to the country to fight another Ebola outbreak, he won’t join them. |
| Speaker 9: | Because looking at the risks that we took, we are left no compensation. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | He says, look at the risks that we took and we didn’t get compensated for that. That’s why if Ebola happened again- |
| Speaker 9: | Nobody would tap into my knowledge to work again. I will not do that. |
| Ngozi Cole: | And the old treatment center, they tell us they want to look for a colleague’s grave. He was a nurse who worked there and died of Ebola. |
| Speaker 9: | We are heading now to the cemetery. We buried the patients who died. |
| Ngozi Cole: | Because dead bodies were highly infectious, everyone, except for Dr. Khan was buried in a cemetery down the road. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Today, there are rows and rows of big brown mounds and a few wooden placard. A lot of them have fallen down or cracked in half. |
| Speaker 13: | I feel sad. I’m really discouraged if I see these scripts, if I can remember those days. |
| Speaker 9: | So it’s not really easy for us. [foreign language] |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Kenny says, it’s hard to see all these graves. So many Sierra Leonians from across the country died from Ebola and are buried here. |
| Ngozi Cole: | They look for a while, but they aren’t able to find their colleague’s grave. |
| Al Letson: | Kenny, Gloria and other former national staff tell us that MSF promised to pay into their social security program or NASAD, but the money never showed up in their accounts. We’ve seen NASAD statements for five former MSF workers and there’s no record of these payments. We asked MSF about this several times, the organization did not answer those questions. We spent a lot of time trying to get to the bottom of this. NASAD is a big government bureaucracy, and it’s possible that the problem is on their end. But the bottom line is, after MSF closed the treatment center, former staff say, there’s no one they can talk to, to fix the problem. |
| Al Letson: | When we come back Indira Govender is torn. She’s proud of the work she did during the Ebola outbreak. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | There’s no doubt that what MSF did was life saving and I think everyone will be forever grateful for that. |
| Al Letson: | But she thinks MSF is deeply segregated and she’s trying to figure out where to go from here. That’s next on Reveal. |
| Speaker 1: | Reveal is brought to you by Progressive. Are you thinking more about how to tighten up your budget these days? Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save over $700 on average and customers can qualify for an average of six discounts when they sign up. A little off your rate each month goes a long way. Get a quote today at progressive.com, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National annual average insurance savings by new customers surveyed in 2020. Potential savings will vary. Discounts vary and are not available in all states and situations. |
| Will Evans: | I’m Will Evans, a reporter here at Reveal. Reveal is a nonprofit news organization and we rely on support from listeners like you. Become a member by texting the word reveal to 474747. Standard data rates apply and you can text stop at any time. Again, text reveal to 474747. Thank you. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Today we’ve been telling you about Doctors Without Borders and how the global health organization is deeply divided. Staff say it’s plagued by a two-tier system that favors foreign staff, also known as expats. They make up a tiny fraction of the workforce, just 10%. They’re paid French salaries. Food, lodging, transportation, and daily spending money are also routinely provided. And sometimes Doctors Without Borders throws in cushy benefits like private school for kids. National staff, who make up 90% of the organization’s workforce, are paid local wages, often a fraction of what expats make. But the issues the organization faces run much deeper than that. |
| Al Letson: | Doctors Without Borders acknowledges that bias, inequality, and institutional racism are problems they have to wrestle with. Throughout today’s show we’ve been following Dr. Indira Govender. She’s worked on both sides of the organization. At the beginning, it was her dream job, but Indira has grown disillusioned. Reporter Mara Kardas-Nelson worked with Indira at Doctors Without Borders in South Africa about a decade ago. She picks up the story from here. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Indira still thinks about her experience fighting Ebola in Sierra Leone. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | That experience was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. That has not changed. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | But she also sees how local staff members felt disrespected, undervalued, and stuck in subservient roles. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | The worst part, it was this amazing life-saving intervention, but they felt dehumanized after they were part of it so that’s a paradox that shouldn’t exist, in my opinion. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | The paradox , it does exist and it’s one Indira has to wrestle with. In the end she decides- |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | I just don’t think that I would feel comfortable going as an expat. I don’t want to be part of this institution until I see radical transformation. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | For a couple years after she left Doctors Without Borders, Indira didn’t really talk about everything that had happened. She still had this trickle of doubt, like maybe she had just seen the worst of it or maybe her experience wasn’t normal and she was just unlucky. Mostly though she was ready to get on with her life. She got married, had kids. Indira got a research job that she loved, but she kept in touch with people who worked for Doctors Without Borders. And so it kept coming up. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | So I saw other people come through the organization and have the same experience and leave feeling disempowered. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | And the more people she talked to, the more Indira thought, you know what, all those experiences, it isn’t just me. It might just be Doctors Without Borders. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | MSF is unfortunately on the wrong side of decolonizing global health. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | In our investigation, we spoke to about a hundred current and former staff. From Ukraine, to Egypt, to Canada, the stories we heard were strikingly similar. We’ve already heard how local staff in Sierra Leone made a small percentage of what expats made. And they got way fewer benefits. This is true in many of the 88 countries in which Doctors Without Borders works. In 2020 on average, MSF spent six times more on each expat than each local staffer. National staff we spoke to also say they routinely heard expats disparaging them. In Egypt, employees say they heard expat colleagues use almost the exact same language Indira heard in South Africa years before. That local staff are lazy, that they just want money. One African staff member at a different site shared a report with us where he claimed his white colleagues referred to a fellow African staff as a chimpanzee, gorilla, and monkey. Indira says these stories speak to a larger truth. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | The wellbeing of national staff are often seem to be secondary to the wellbeing of international staff. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | We learned of several instances of national staff being left behind in dangerous situations often with little or no warning. For example, when a conflict threatened to spill into part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one expat staffer told us that international staff were evacuated, overnight. She said that national staff had no idea what was happening. They just woke up one morning and their colleagues were gone. The staffer says she still thinks about it to this day. She told us it’s just heartbreaking. It’s wrong. |
| Speaker 15: | We are gathered here in order to raise our voice. We are workers of [inaudible] Afghanistan. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | And in late August, just as the US troops were leaving Afghanistan, national staff posted a video on Facebook asking MSF to help get them out. |
| Speaker 15: | We went to the main office of MSF and they say that we will help you, but they didn’t. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | In the video about two dozen men and women are seen protesting in Kabul, holding signs that say, our lives matter. The speaker says that they’ve worked for the organization for years. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | We asked Doctors Without Borders if they had plans to evacuate national staff. In a written statement given to us in early September, a spokesperson said, no. They are offering to provide national staff with certificates, proving they were employed with the organization and Doctors Without Borders said it is giving national staff accurate information about the possibilities for evacuation and other immigration pathways. Doctors Without Borders stress that as of early September, it was still providing care at five sites in Afghanistan with some 2300 national staff and 50 expats. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Doctors Without Borders also told us it was negotiating with the Taliban and assured national staff they would be safe. In a written statement, the organization said that it bears specific responsibility towards staff who relocate to danger zones as part of their work with the group. And I should add that Doctors Without borders is not alone here. Other organizations, including the UN have also been criticized for not doing enough to get local staff out of Afghanistan. And in the end, evacuations of Afghan nationals have proven extremely challenging and often impossible. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Indira and the majority of the people we spoke to say the underlying problem here is who gets to make decisions. 50 years after it was founded in France, five of the organizations six main operational centers are still based in Europe. They decide its priorities and assign staff to missions. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | Those attitudes are very much colonial attitudes and colonial ways of doing things. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Doctors Without Borders says it’s confronting the hard truths about how racism and colonialism are embedded in the organization. To begin addressing the problem, they say they opened an operational center in West Africa, but Doctors Without Borders has acknowledged these issues for almost 15 years. In 2006, the organization pledged to give all staff fair opportunities. Over the next decade, it held meeting after meeting, issuing one mea culpa after another and pledging to do better. But more than a thousand former and current staffers have come out publicly to say nothing has changed. |
| Sam Bumicho: | Looking back from 2006 and now we are in 2021, that’s quite a long time. Of course, we need to work towards delivering change faster. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Sam Bumicho is the vice president of Doctors Without Borders International Board. It guides the organization, but doesn’t supervise day to day operations. Bumicho is a physician from Kenya. |
| Sam Bumicho: | Of course there’s still white and Western over-representation in our top management. And this is something that we need to actively and more robustly address. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Sam was once a national staff member and was elected to the position several weeks before we spoke. He says the issues we’re raising aren’t isolated incidents. |
| Sam Bumicho: | I worked as a national staff for more than 10 years so I’m familiar with this frustration. I’m very familiar with it. I’ve lived it, I’ve experienced it. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Sam says Doctors Without Border staff have rightly highlighted the problems of structural racism within the organization for years. And he says people must keep raising their voice to make change. I pushed him on this point. People have been saying these things for a really long time and have been coming out for decades, so you’re still putting the burden on staff to say what they’ve already said. |
| Sam Bumicho: | I’m not putting the burden on the staff, but we need information. Where do we get this information? We go out to the field. We need to speak to the people. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | But Sam, you have that information. I mean that information has come out for decades from thousands of people at this point. |
| Sam Bumicho: | We need to engage. We need to have this conversation without staff and colleagues feeling that it’s a burden to them. We need to have a constant conversation. We need to continue engaging. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | This spring six years after leaving Doctors Without Borders, Indira says national staff in South Africa asked her to run for one of Doctors Without Borders governing bodies. They wanted her to push for change. She turned them down. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | I’m just so fed up because I just don’t think that there’s ever going to be any change here. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | But she kept thinking about it. A few months later, she decided to run. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | Instead of saying, no, I thought, let me just go in there and say what I think and if they don’t like me, they don’t have to vote for me so that’s what I did. I went in and I told them that I don’t like the way MSF is run. It’s not representative. It’s old. It’s stale. This white male patriarchy needs to go. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | In May of 2021 end India went on Zoom to give a speech. She was running to become a representative of something called the Movement Wide Association. It’s one of the many bodies for current and former staff and advises the greater organization. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | I stand for here is a commitment to anti-racism and yeah, dealing with that in MSF. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | She won. She was shocked. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | Because my experience 10 years ago was of being ostracized and sidelined because of my opinions. And now I’m voted into the Movement Wide Association, basically for those same opinions. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Indira is part of a growing wave of people pushing for change, including a group that formed just over a year ago called Decolonize MSF. In the summer of 2020, Decolonize published the letter, calling on the organization to commit to immediate, tangible changes. After news outlets covered the rebellion, Doctors Without Borders issued public statements acknowledging they’ve failed to tackle institutional racism. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Indira reached out to me a few weeks ago. She told me something that surprised me. Even after her own experience with racism at Doctors Without Borders, she continues to make a monthly donation to them. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | And I think it’s because as much as I have my personal opinions and my own experience, I cannot deny the fact that they do reach some of the most vulnerable people and they do save lives and they do also speak out against those atrocities. |
| Mara Kardas-Nel…: | Indira says some people are so mad that they want to burn it all down, but she’s not with them. She says there’s too much at stake. What would happen to all those patients who rely on Doctors Without Borders care? |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | You know, people sometimes want us to choose one or the other, like you can’t love MSF, have these attitudes towards them. You can’t say you had this amazing experience, but then also talk about the fact that you witnessed racism or you experienced racism. It’s very much a theme in all of this. It’s like this cognitive dissonance. |
| Al Letson: | Indira’s discomfort with that in-betweenness, of loving and hating Doctors Without Borders, that’s what it’s pushing her to keep going. She’s now an active member of Decolonized MSF, a group she thought would never exist. |
| Dr. Indira Gove…: | I am a bit more optimistic because I think that the more people talk about these things, the more courage it gives everybody to talk about it. |
| Al Letson: | Another point of optimism, today, 50% of expats come from outside Europe and North America. That’s up from 25% just 10 years ago. There’s also more national staff and leadership positions around the world. Doctors Without Borders representatives tell us they’re also reviewing pay structure, but say the changes don’t mean that local and foreign staff will have the same contract pay or benefits. The organization says that’s impossible with a global workforce. And to meet this moment, Doctors Without Borders has launched an initiative called The MSF We Want To Be. The organization is asking thousands of current and former staff about its culture and its diversity and inclusion efforts. Initial results are expected in 2022. |
| Al Letson: | This week’s episode was created in partnership with Insider, the global news site. You can read more at insider.com. It was is reported by Mara Kardas-Nelson, Ngozi Cole and Sean Campbell. Katherine Mieszkowski and Pamela Kirkland produced our show. Queena Kim edited today’s episode with additional editing from Brett Myers. Special thanks to John Cook at Insider, as well as Aria [Afrari] and Daniel Gross. And shout out to our former colleagues Chris Camili, Jen Chinen and Laura Sarchesky who helped us get this project going. |
| Al Letson: | If you’ve worked in global health and have a story to tell about your experience, reach out on Twitter to Mara Kardas-Nelson. She’s at Mara Jen KN that’s at M-A-R-A-J-E-N-N-K-N. |
| Al Letson: | Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production manager is Amy, the great Mostafa. Original score and sound designed by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando, my man, Arruda. They had help this week from Steven Rescon, the G-Bamini, and Claire, C-Note, Mullin. Our digital producer is Sarah Merck. Our interim CEO is Annie Chabel. Sumi Aggarwal is our interim editor in chief. And our executive producer is Kevin Sullivan. Our theme music is by Comarado Lightning. |
| Al Letson: | Support for reveals provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Heising Simons Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Democracy Fund and the In As Much Foundation. Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. |
| Al Letson: | I’m Al Letson. And remember, there is always more to the story. |
| Speaker 17: | I’m about to play you a preview of 9/12. While you’re listening, be sure to follow 9/12 wherever you get your podcasts or you can binge all seven episodes right now on Amazon Music or with Wondery Plus. |
| Dan Taberski: | I’m Dan Taberski. Do you want to hear my 9/11 story? Yeah, me neither, because what I want to talk about is what happened on 9/12 and every day after that. |
| Speaker 19: | This morning, less than 24 hours later, the signature of the New York skyline is no more. |
| Dan Taberski: | 9/12 is a documentary podcast about how we turned 0/11 the day into 9/11, the idea and how that idea was used to shape the next 20 years. |
| Speaker 20: | One year ago today, we remember what the terrorist fraught. |
| Dan Taberski: | 9/11 became a call to arms. |
| Speaker 21: | Plane crashes. I say, I’m going to join the military. Another plane crashes. |
| Speaker 22: | Five years ago, America was a nation of peace. |
| Dan Taberski: | 9/11 became a dangerous joke to tell. |
| Speaker 23: | I eventually came up with a headline of, nation vows to defeat whoever it is we are at war with. |
| Dan Taberski: | It’s when conspiracies sprouted. The original super spreader before all that came since. |
| Speaker 23: | Everything that’s happening now is bananas. Like Sandy Hook is bananas. Flat earth is bananas. Q Anon is bananas. Oh yeah, how convenient that you think all those other conspiracy theories are bananas, but you don’t think your own pet theory is banana. First of all, I don’t fucking know what happened on 9/11. |
| Dan Taberski: | How much of who we are now is because of what happened then on that day 20 years ago. And do we finally have enough distance to see it clearly? Follow 9/12 wherever you get your podcasts, or you can binge all seven episodes right now on Amazon Music or with Wondery Plus. |
| Speaker 26: | From PRX. |