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Karin Huster encounters death closely and repeatedly.
She saw babies perish in their mother's arms. She saw people in mourning while their loved ones were buried in yellow bags covered in bleach. She survived a clinic where she was attacked, burned and shot.
"It's the best job in the world," she says. "And I do not think lightly."
As a nurse and field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, and previously with other organizations, Huster spends six to twelve weeks at home away from home in Seattle to help some of the most vulnerable people in the community. world. She recently visited the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where Ebola killed 2,006 people and nauseated 2,899 since August 2018.
The Ebola virus was discovered for the first time in 1976 in the DRC, then known as Zaire. Death by the virus, which goes through body fluids, is atrocious. Victims often die from dehydration due to severe diarrhea and vomiting. Whole families can be ravaged by the disease after being kept at home.
The World Health Organization declared the epidemic of global health epidemic July 17, 2019, while Huster was making his fourth trip to this country of Central Africa.
Although such statements do not push its neighbors to act, Huster says Americans should pay attention to Ebola outbreaks in far-off countries.
"Some people are placed in extremely fragile, vulnerable situations – they are afraid and they need help," Huster said. "That's why people have to care about it, it's fundamental. Basically, we are all human beings. They may be from different countries, but they are really the same. It's the same planet. "
She mentions migrants fleeing Central America to the United States or areas of extreme poverty in the Appalachian Mountains where she volunteered. Suffering does not respect borders, she says.
Nevertheless, when Huster is at home, she does not talk much about what she saw or experienced, nor about the mental weight it takes. It's hard to deal with people who live comfortably in Seattle.
"Even my husband, he knows better now than to ask," she said. "You are somehow isolated."
Huster has not yet used the mental health services provided by Doctors Without Borders. His main job was to write editorials in newspapers and medical journals.
In a Seattle Times editorial in 2014, she spoke of the fear that gripped the United States after a man with Ebola in West Africa passed through Texas, where he died. Panicked rhetoric and subsequent political decisions, she explained, discouraged US health workers from moving to help stop the epidemic – which is paradoxical. more probably the virus would spread around the world.
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Helping people in need is Huster's dream since she was growing up in Reunion Island, a French island in the Indian Ocean, about 60 km east of Madagascar.
His Dutch mother and his French father bought a black-and-white television and allowed him to watch the news only with his brother. It was in the late 1960s and the war between Nigeria and Biafran was raging. Huster recalls seeing "starving people and this group of doctors come to help, and [thinking]"Ah, that's what I want to do."
In 1991, Huster moved to Seattle to work with Microsoft, translating Word into French. She met her husband, Frank, who translated Excel into French. They had two children and she settled in a stable life in her foster home.
But those childhood dreams started to eat her.
She left Microsoft, enrolled in the University of Washington School of Nursing, and spent eight years as a nurse in the ICU of Harborview Medical Center before returning to the University. from Washington for a master's degree in global health.
In 2012, while he was in school, Huster went to Lebanon to work with Syrian refugees. Two years later, she joined the Partners in Health group in the fight against the world's largest known Ebola outbreak, which swept through West Africa and finally killed 11,325 people in Liberia. Sierra Leone and Guinea.
In recent years, Huster's work has also brought her to Mosul, where she has treated wounded civilians in fighting between ISIS and Iraqi forces, and Mozambique to help victims of a devastating cyclone. .
Students are not always ready to work in the field like Huster, said Stephen Gloyd, who has been leading the master's program at the UW's Department of Global Health since 1988. What distinguished her, did she? he says, was the right combination of commitment, interpersonal skills and fearlessness.
"There is a remarkable theme that aligns all of her work in that she is the first person to follow her mission, her passion, to help people in an emergency situation," she said. Gloyd.
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The third Huster deployment in the DRC in May came to an abrupt end after the outbreak of a new Ebola clinic. Two days later, a group of men hit a car through a barrier and began shooting in the temporary processing center.
Residents of this border region with Uganda, Rwanda and South Sudan have a deep understandable distrust of the central government and question the massive response to Ebola in relation to other persistent health problems said Huster.
"People are angry," she said. "They tell you," You do not care about us for 30 years, 40 years and now, suddenly, you care about us because it's Ebola, but what about my child who has just died of malaria? "
West African public health officials have found it effective to take into account the concerns and concerns of the local population as a way of treating the Ebola virus more broadly. This holistic approach has been slow to arrive in the DRC, said Huster.
Since her return, she has been in contact with the DRC Ministry of Health and local governments to discuss treatment strategies and ensure the safety of the mission. Huster also addresses biker groups in the region, who act as taxis and are at risk of being exposed to the Ebola virus while transporting sick patients. Traditional healers and women's groups are also part of her remit, she says, because women have a great influence in their communities and are those who initially care for the sick.
The fight against the Ebola virus spread from North Kivu to two neighboring provinces, and a Congolese girl who went to Uganda became infected with the virus.
But there have also been some positive developments lately. A second vaccine is showing promising results and two of the four field-tested treatments are optimistic for health workers.
Huster must leave the DRC on September 7th. She will come home for a month or two before returning to her mission.
"My goal in life is to try to improve people's lives," she said. "I'm not here for money, you know. If that were the case, I would still be at Microsoft. "
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