When being afraid is being alive
Its aim is to provide rudimentary healthcare to people in need in seventy countries all over the world. To fulfill this mission, three notions are on the agenda: impartiality, independence and neutrality, because Medecins sans Frontieres take an interest in the human being and not in peoples ideas, whether they are religious or political. To be more efficient they do not want to be linked to any party or institution. Neither do they want to take part in any conflict, other than to provide help and support to the people who are most in need, that is to say pregnant women, children, old people and refugees.
But being neutral does not mean arriving in the country; doing your job and going back home in the evening as in daily life. The daily life of Medecins sans Frontieres takes place in Mali, Benin, Nigeria, Nepal, Laos, Bangladesh, but also in places like Poland, Belgium, France and Italy, countries where you would not expect them to be. That is one of the reasons why the second main role of the association is to say loudly what the doctors and nurses see every day, to reveal the reality they are confronted with and that we sometimes do not even suspect, and not to keep silent.
The key issue is to catch people’s attention, and, in order to do so, that of journalists. Agenda setting mostly takes into account what happens in your own country or what directly concerns you, leaving apart regions of the world such as Darfur. Moreover, it is not easy to keep journalists’ interest alive, especially when a situation of conflict is lingering without any great changes that could add something new to the story. Medecins sans Frontieres denounced the conflict as soon as it started in 2003, but their message was far from the preoccupations of the journalists at that time. When, a year later, the media began to cover the event, Medecins sans Frontieres could just say “We already knew that.”
Even if nowadays, journalists are maintaining a level of fear, it does not seem to work. There, people are killed, and here, well… it is much too far away for us to be afraid.
Posted in 2007-10: agendasetting| 23.10.07
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