What is most troublesome about MSF's new report is the presumption that the only solution to humanitarian crisis is intervention by foreign organizations. This assumption pops up throughout the document, most strikingly perhaps in this finding from the foreword: “many humanitarian actors are now working at arm’s length through local NGOs or government authorities, acting more as technical experts, intermediaries or donors than field actors.”
I grew up thinking of doctors as distant, other-worldly experts who asked a few questions, spoke in a deep baritone and dispensed the truth. Practicing pediatrics, I learned a very different reality. The best way for me to help children was to enlist parents and other caregivers as allies. I found this to be true in a children’s hospital in a large American city, a small health center in an African village and in an orphanage in post-genocide Rwanda.