Midwives working for Médecins Sans Frontières

Tissi is a very small place in the very big country of Chad. If you look Tissi up on google maps you won't find it. However, it lies right down in the bottom East hand corner of Chad, approximately 7 km from the border with conflict-ravaged Darfur (Sudan), and less than 1 km from the also conflict-ravaged Central African Republic (CAR). It is a very volatile region and currently hosts Sudanese refugees affected by the fighting in Darfur and Chadian returnees from CAR.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has set up a health facility in Tissi offering health care to tens of thousands of people. We see many different kinds of patients: women with complicated labours; people with gunshot wounds; malnourished children; children damaged by mines they found while playing in the sand; women with postpartum infections; people with malaria. It is a remote little village and it can take a very long time to get here—and a very long time to get out if it is rainy season.