One afternoon, miles away from her home in Singapore, Dr Deborah Khoo was attending to a 12-year-old girl with a gunshot wound in her leg. When she and her medical team asked the girl how it happened, they were stunned by her response.
Through an interpreter, they learned that the girl had been shot by her younger brother – who had access to an AK-47 assault rifle.
This is just one of the cases the 35-year-old came across while on a three-month mission in Afghanistan under Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders.
From April to June 2024, the anaesthesiologist at Singapore General Hospital (SGH) was based at the Kunduz Trauma Centre, a healthcare facility run by MSF. Kunduz is a city in north Afghanistan, about seven hours by road from the capital, Kabul.
The centre treats people with trauma injuries, such as from traffic accidents or fights and conflicts. The facility was originally destroyed in a United States airstrike in 2015 and reopened in 2021.
MSF is an independent, non-profit organisation founded in France in 1971 that provides emergency medical aid to people affected by war, epidemics, natural disasters and a lack of access to healthcare. It operates in more than 70 countries, including Ukraine, France, Sudan, Syria, Mexico, India and Thailand.
For three months, Dr Khoo lived and worked with other MSF volunteers at the centre, treating patients like the 12-year-old girl and many others with traumatic injuries in a region where access to safe medical care is rare.
DRIVEN BY A NEED TO HELP OTHERS
Dr Khoo told CNA Women that she had always been drawn to medical humanitarian work, so it came as little surprise to her family when she applied to volunteer with MSF in 2023.
