Louise Johnston is an Australian nurse who has been working for Médecins Sans Frontières for about a year. Before this, Louise was an emergency nurse in Melbourne and had also spent some time working in a remote Australian Aboriginal community.

Haiti is her third time working with Médecins Sans Frontières and like the first two times, this experience is just as different in nature. Louise’s first field placement was on a massive emergency vaccination campaign against an epidemic of meningococcal meningitis, where Médecins Sans Frontières vaccinated 1.2 million people in Niger in just over two months. “It took me out into the remote depths of the sub-Saharan desert in the worst heat I have ever experienced, visiting some amazing villages.” Louise’s second field placement was in the northern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, establishing the project’s pharmacy and supervising the running of paediatric and surgical interventions in the hospital. Most of the Congolese people in the area were displaced through war and the terror inflicted by frequent violent attacks of the Lord’s Resistance Army.