Staff profile: Bec Smith
Home:
Broome, Australia (Yawuru land)
MSF experience:
Ethiopia, Kiribati, Ukraine, Palestine
Bec spoke to us from the MSF field hospital in Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza, where she returned on a second assignment as a nursing activity manager in mid-2025, after previously working there in 2024.
How did you first join MSF?
I’m a nurse of about 20 years’ experience in Australia. I started out in the operating theatre, then I went emergency room, then I went bush, and now I’m back with the ER in Broome Hospital. I started with MSF during COVID. It was early 2021, and my first assignment was to Tigray, in Ethiopia, during the civil war. It was very unstable. But I had such a good crew, and it was such a good experience that I was hooked. I came home and I said to my husband, I’m going to have to do this every year now.
What was it that got you ‘hooked’?
I was doing outreach on that assignment, and we were going into villages that hadn’t had any healthcare for ages or had been cut off by fighting. If they heard you were coming, people would line up from the nighttime to wait for the mobile clinic to come. And you saw everything, from new babies to war wounds to an eviscerated [disembowelled] patient. So to deal with primary healthcare, but then emergency care, all out the back of a troopy [4x4], doing the best we could – it was immediate and it was life-preserving and it was so fulfilling that I was just hooked.
I’ve always loved the bush work, where you have a rapport with the people that you’re with, and you’re travelling and delivering aid. I felt like this really tapped into that thing that I really loved about bush work.
How did it compare to what you experienced working in Australia?
There’s a lot of similarities. You’re dealing with people that are disadvantaged, people that have diseases and health conditions that you don’t see in mainstream Australian medical care, like rheumatic heart disease, scabies – all the diseases of inequality. You see them in remote Australia, and you certainly saw them in Ethiopia. And a lot of the guidelines that MSF uses are very similar to the bush guidelines that we use – an emphasis on primary healthcare and vaccination and paediatric care. So there were more similarities than there were differences.
You later worked in Ukraine, and now you’ve been on your second assignment in Gaza. How would you describe working in a conflict zone?
The experience of working in a conflict zone is that it’s just so immediate. You have to be very resilient. It does take a toll on you. It does affect your relationships at home, because you see stuff that people don’t believe or they have no concept of what that’s like to work in that situation. So I think you have to be aware that it’s going to do those things. But the payoff is that you help in the immediate – you can save a life very quickly. You can work with the people who have been working in this for a long time. Just by working shoulder to shoulder with them, you improve their morale. And just to witness these small and really big acts of bravery that you see every day in the conflict area is really humbling. It gives your life meaning. It puts everything into perspective to see people acting in such marvellous ways.
You’re about to depart Gaza after your second assignment there. How are you feeling about that?
I’m really torn up about it actually, because, you know, our registration has been denied. We have all these activities that we’re still going to try to support. But it’s hard to leave a job not done. And to leave it in such a state of uncertainty is very difficult. I feel for my Palestinian colleagues here that are going to be left to manage this, with little supply and no sort of international staff support. It’s really hard. And today being my last day, I feel like I’m going to cry the whole day.
You’ve been outspoken in media interviews here in Australia about what you’ve witnessed in Gaza. What part does speaking out play for you, in terms of what MSF is doing?
I’m not a natural public speaker by any stretch. I find it really difficult, and I don’t love doing it, but I feel like it’s my job. It’s a really important part of this job. If we’re here to see it, we must speak on it. My colleagues here are adamant that I must do as much as I can and speak as much as I can about what’s happening. Because there is also the fear that once MSF international staff are no longer here, and the other 36 deregistered NGOs are no longer here to speak, what is going to happen? When there’s no eyes on Gaza, what will happen? Everybody’s very frightened about this – with good reason, I think.
And for you, what’s next?
I’ll be remotely supporting the national staff from home for a little while, because they’ve had to take on the positions that I’m doing here now. My tribe in Broome, my husband and my friends, they rally around me and make sure that I’m healthy in my body and my mind, because I always come back a little bit broken. They look after me. I’ll do that and then I’ll be back at work in the Broome ED – until the next assignment.
Staff profile: Grant Clark
Home:
Auckland (Tāmaki Makaurau)
MSF experience:
Liberia, Yemen, Sudan
How did you start out in MSF?
I had an engineering degree and then did a lot of work with USAID and a few others doing natural disaster, post-disaster reconstruction in the Caribbean and Africa. The work opportunities were quite limited, and they were moving towards a model where internationals were just based in big cities, and national staff in the field. Someone said you would probably prefer the MSF model – there’s more work, more interesting work, and you get to be in the field. They thought it would be a good fit. Originally I was looking at roles as an engineer, but I ended up doing logistics team leader and operations roles. I absolutely love it. It’s a perfect fit right now.
Your first MSF assignment was in Liberia. How was that?
It was a closure project. There was a logistics manager role, and it was a very good one to sort of get running. We didn’t really have an active hospital; we were just doing outreach projects. Socially it was a lot of fun – we had an MSF football team and every Saturday we would drive into the mountains and play these little communities. Because of the closure, it was a bit tricky, but it was a good way to get to know the MSF systems without a huge amount of pressure. Then I went to Yemen, and there was the operational hospital, with very experienced national staff, so progressing to something considerably more difficult. I’ve been lucky to go through these steps.
And now in Sudan – is it more of a challenge?
It is. It’s a logistics team leader role, as opposed to logistics manager. The coordination team is busy looking after what’s happening in the west – in the Kordofans and in Darfur. So it’s for you to make the decisions and get on with it. Also, because of the war, the skilled workforce, the experienced people – they went to Egypt, Dubai, Uganda, and they have not returned. So a high portion of my role is coaching, managing, upskilling, training – more than I would do elsewhere. And the hospital we’re in [in South Khartoum] was a really good hospital built in the ’90s, but after two years of war in and around Khartoum, everything – the electrics, the building, all the biomedical equipment, the water system, the waste system – is just ruined. We’re trying to fix the worst bits, but it’s extremely hard, and we can’t get spare parts into the country. A huge amount of the people we’re seeing in the south of Khartoum are mothers with their children. Each week our numbers are going up, but our staff numbers are remaining somewhat the same, so we’re getting busier and busier.
Can you explain what a logistics specialist does?
I always put it to friends like this: imagine the doctors and the nurses as the ones physically doing the work, the ones on the front line. If a doctor goes to work, what do they need to work all day without disruption? Electricity, water, clean drinking water for their patients, biomedical equipment that works, security, ambulances or vehicles for staff. Wi-Fi and comms technology. Removing all the different forms of waste from the hospital. All these things enable the medical team to do their job.
What about supply?
One of the big things is the market in Khartoum has not come back. We don’t have access to good electrical equipment, furniture, biomedical equipment. The exchange rate is changing constantly, so the cost
of items, getting fuel, all these things that were probably quite easy and straightforward before are very difficult now.
What are you dealing with in terms of security and conflict?
When you’re in Omdurman here at night, it seems very calm. In September, October, there were some drone strikes, but for the last three months, almost nothing. There’s a very big police presence and military presence in the city. We don’t see street crime, domestic issues, protesting, demonstrations. It’s not seen.
We live in Omdurman in the northwest, but we work in the south, and every day we drive for one hour through the city of Khartoum, and the city has been completely annihilated. In the past it would have been three hours because of the traffic, and now it’s nothing. We’re one of the only cars on the street. And a lot of our national staff, where we drive through, they tell us, “That’s where I went to school”, “That’s where we went to university, “That’s my uncle’s house”. It looks like it’ll be a generational rebuild. It’s extremely sad.
What do you do in your downtime?
I’m doing like 12-, 13-hour days, it’s so heavy with work. But I don’t mind it – the work is super interesting. We’re very lucky though, because we have all five sections of MSF living on the same road. We’re all over the city with our work, but we all live on this road, so every weekend we all hang out together. It’s really nice and very unique. And I play football on the pitch behind our house.
What’s next?
I’ll come back to New Zealand in May. I was trying to be home for summer, but three years in a row I’ve been home for winter. I keep timing it wrong. I come home for about two months – two months is perfect, and then I get itchy feet and I want to go again. The next plan is to go home for a time, then go on a French immersion and then do a French-speaking assignment. That’s my 2026 plan.