Hello and welcome to my blog. My name is Aoife Doran. I am twenty-nine years old and I am a doctor from Ireland. I live in Dublin, my home city, and I enjoy running, hiking and cycling.

Feel free to read more as I update from the field about ‘Life in Lebanon’!

Irish volunteers are currently 'on mission' in Democratic Republic Of Congo; Ethiopia; Haiti; India; Lebanon; Pakistan; Uganda; and South Sudan.  Working in high-profile emergencies and the silent, forgotten crises, MSF's Irish volunteers strive to bring medical aid to the people most in need.

Cormac is a GP from Co. Galway, and is currently working in MSF’s nutrition project in Bentiu Unity state, South Sudan.

Bentiu is located close to South Sudan’s oil fields and the border with Sudan.It is an an area particularly vulnerable to food shortages and MSF has run a therapeutic nutrition programme serving the town and surrounding areas since 2010.

'Dispatches' is a quarterly magazine sent to our supporters in homes around Ireland.   This magazine is written by MSF staff working in the field and is designed to keep our supporters informed about MSF's work on the ground.

Each issue is accompanied by a cover letter written by one of our Irish volunteers 'on mission'.

From Co. Dublin, Maeve Lalor works as an Epidemiologist for the Multi Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) Directly observed treatment shortcourse (DOTS ) Plus project in Nukus, Uzbekistan. A graduate of UCD, Maeve previously worked at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where she completed her PhD on Population Differences in Immune Responses to BCG vaccination.  This is her first assignment with MSF. 

During a week of intense violence that preceded the arrest of former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo on April 11, the MSF team working at the Abobo Sud Hospital in northern Abidjan was isolated and unable to obtain additional supplies from the outside. Delphine Chedorge, coordinator of the MSF team in Abobo Sud, kept a diary in which she describes the teams' daily life during this tense period.