Boggini started with the organization in 1999, after working for eight years in the Peace Corps, primarily in the West African country of Sierra Leone. Her husband had died and her four children were grown, allowing the woman to indulge a dream she had back in college. Boggini lived in Sierra Leone for three years with the Peace Corps, evacuating when a coup there arose in 1994, and has been back several times with MSF to see her former neighbors and hear their sad stories. One couple had five children from 12 to 18 years old when Boggini knew them in 1994. That's when the town was attacked during the war there and all five children were taken, only two of whom have been found since. "That's the kind of sad stories" you hear, she says. "These are the kind of people who were my coworkers, my friends." With villages burned, "It's amazing how people can continue on. They still have such hope that things could get better," she says.
Sierra Leone RPCV Jane Boggini works with Doctors Without Borders
Tolland nurse works with Doctors Without Borders
By Kimberly Phillips, Journal Inquirer
09/22/2006
It's hard for Jane Boggini to pick one memory to highlight from her time in the south of Sudan this spring. But as she looks out into a horse pasture in the rear of her home in Tolland, she tells the story of a teenage boy who came into her camp on the back of a donkey cart.
During the dry season in that country, she explains, the men and boys take their animals to find water, as this boy had done with his male elders. But the boy contracted cholera, and by the time he reached Boggini on that donkey cart it was too late.
Stories like these are all too familiar for Boggini, who works as a nurse with Doctors Without Borders, the organization better known worldwide as Medecins Sans Frontieres or MSF.
Boggini started with the organization in 1999, after working for eight years in the Peace Corps, primarily in the West African country of Sierra Leone. Her husband had died and her four children were grown, allowing the woman to indulge a dream she had back in college.
800 people looking for help
Her first mission with MSF was to Angola in southwest Africa to work in a feeding center with malnourished children. Since then she's worked with the organization overseas 13 times - Cambodia, Bangladesh, Pakistan.
Each time the organization calls on her, Boggini says, she has the opportunity to turn down a mission, meaning she can maintain a life in the United States with her 12 grandsons, taking the summers and Christmases to be with them.
Sometimes she has weeks to get ready for a mission, she says; other times just hours.
While visiting her daughter in Idaho recently, Boggini received an e-mail from MSF seeking assistance in Pakistan after an earthquake there. That was a Sunday; by Wednesday she was on the go.
Most of MSF's work includes vaccination camps for measles and other diseases, feeding centers for those without food, and health clinics for those with cholera or malaria. The organization helps displaced people still living in their home countries or refugees from other countries, most of whom are driven out by war.
During her first mission to Angola, Boggini says, there was shelling and fighting going on at the airport, so the pilot had to perform a "spiral landing" where the plane literally spiraled toward the runway.
"You're like pasted into the seat," Boggini says, gripping the arms on her chair.
She had to get her passport stamped by one of the few people still in the airport, then she was driven through a deserted town to the MSF base. Boggini says she entered the feeding center, which was in a building that looked like a high school gymnasium, and saw 800 mothers and their children looking to her for help.
"That's where I began," she says.
Because the country is peppered with landmines, Boggini says, she was restricted in her movement when she wasn't working 12 hours a day at the feeding center. At night she and the other MSF workers would have to return to quarters for their own safety, but leave behind the women and children.
After three months when she was about to leave, the feeding center was closing as life there returned to some normality, Boggini says, explaining that when she arrived in Angola there was no central market. By the time she left it had reopened.
Sad stories everywhere
In recent years, MSF has put an emphasis on mental-health counseling to make sure refugees and displaced people can handle the stress of their situations, she says. After the earthquake in Pakistan, once people's medical issues had been addressed, MSF helped them cope with the shock.
And while the focus of the organization isn't primary health care, Boggini says, in the Democratic Republic of Congo MSF set up a hospital, including a surgery unit, in an area where there hadn't been a facility for years. And because of civil struggles there, the hospital is equipped to handle the surging number of rape cases.
In Afghanistan, she and others set up a primary health care facility for displaced people near the Pakistan border, but without a female doctor to examine the displaced women only men took advantage of the facility.
Then desperation hit, and the displaced women allowed an older male doctor, who was deemed "safe," to examine them as long as Boggini and their husband or son witnessed the exam. And still, the doctor could listen to their heartbeats with a stethoscope only through their clothing, not on bare skin.
"You see you affect some people," Boggini says of the work, but oftentimes "You wish you could do more."
Boggini lived in Sierra Leone for three years with the Peace Corps, evacuating when a coup there arose in 1994, and has been back several times with MSF to see her former neighbors and hear their sad stories.
One couple had five children from 12 to 18 years old when Boggini knew them in 1994. That's when the town was attacked during the war there and all five children were taken, only two of whom have been found since.
"That's the kind of sad stories" you hear, she says. "These are the kind of people who were my coworkers, my friends."
With villages burned, "It's amazing how people can continue on. They still have such hope that things could get better," she says.
Tourists get glimpse
Boggini's current mission began this week - in New York City. She's serving as a tour guide through a mock refugee came set up in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The exhibition is open through Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. in the park near Long Meadow at Grand Army Plaza.
She guides tour groups through artifacts brought back from missions, showing rudimentary cooking utensils and toys made out of tin cans. In the tent where refugees would sleep, she crams in 10 people and tells them they would have to find a way to rest.
In the food distribution area, tourists get to see what emergency food rations are like, and pick up the heavy water cans that have to be transported to and from potable sources. She also explains that refugees, who've lived in the bush, have to be taught that using a latrine is more hygienic for them.
Imagine the feeling, she says, of being displaced from your home for 57 years in the case of the Palestinians or for 20 years for those in Sudan in northern Africa. Entire generations of people live as international refugees or displaced people in their home countries.
There's a health tent at the mock refugee camp where she shows tourists the arm band used to measure the degree of malnutrition in children and a vaccination area where everyone gets shots for measles.
In the cholera tent, chlorine sprayers are set up and she explains that it's dehydration that actually kills people with cholera, like that young teenager in Sudan.
"It was too late," Boggini says of him. "He was such a young boy."
©Journal Inquirer 2006
