Alec Kelly’s office is often in a war zone, helping deliver emergency aid around the world with Médecins Sans Frontières
Alec Kelly has a job most people couldn’t imagine. When he goes on work trips, he doesn’t stay at luxury hotels or dine at the city’s top restaurants. For the past seven years, Alec has worked for international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Médecins Sans Frontières delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters in over 70 countries.
During his time at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Alec has set up hospitals, clinics, treatment centres and programs in emergency and conflict settings. Working in Lebanon, Sudan, Jamaica, Syria, Haiti, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). And he’s done all this through ebola and cholera outbreaks and COVID-19.
Currently based between the head office in The Netherlands and the field office in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where he is implementing the rehabilitation of a maternity hospital and a medical program within that hospital, Alec spoke to me from Amsterdam where he is temporarily sidelined. “We’ve had a lot of difficulty maintaining progress momentum due to security constraints,” he tells me. “The project has had to be evacuated due to the conflict in the neighbourhood.”
The 35-year-old Australian is unfazed by the developments. “When you work in conflict zones for quite a while, you get more comfortable (with this),” he says.
Alec’s earlier career in the military might account for his relaxed attitude. After four years in the armed forces, he travelled for six years, living in Norway and France and sailing across the Atlantic, before he realised something was missing. “It was time to look at how to give back in some way,” he says.
When he started looking into what work he could do with his skill set, he came across an advertisement that fit the bill. “It said, ‘If you can do pump and generator maintenance and want to go work in humanitarian crises, apply.’ So I did.”
He started in the DRC, managing the logistics for the opening of an Ebola treatment project. “It was very difficult, my first time working with the organisation. And my French was not very good,” he says. “It was a massive learning curve.
“Dealing with the community dynamics around a disease that causes a lot of fear is complicated,” he says. “You’re not really ready for the idea that people might not necessarily believe that the disease exists or question your reasons for being there.”
After completing two Ebola projects, he was wrapping up his time in the DRC when COVID-19 hit. Hours away from leaving to fly back to Australia, Alec worried he would be stuck in Australia and unable to work, so asked if there was anything else for him to do in the DRC. “They said, ‘Yeah, actually in Goma, they’re going to open a COVID-19 treatment facility.’ So I became the logistician for that.”
When asked if he ever worries for his own health, Alec admits it isn’t a major concern. “Once you make a decision to stay somewhere, everything becomes normalised very quickly,” he says. “I figured I could probably get COVID-19 wherever I was.”
“Dealing with the community dynamics around a disease that causes a lot of fear is complicated.”
Irrespective of the health and security concerns that would worry most, one of Alec’s most rewarding experiences at MSF was as a project manager in Sudan. “We were in the government of Sudan-controlled areas and the Rapid Support Forces (Sudanese paramilitary) launched a bunch of drone attacks,” Alec says. A cholera outbreak followed.
Despite the challenges, Alec enjoyed the impact he and his team were able to generate and felt the skills and experience he’d acquired over his time at MSF came to a head. “We were able to do a lot of good really quickly in a very dynamic situation,” he says.
“Working for an organisation like MSF, you’re able to work in places where humanitarian needs are very apparent and there’s little question about their existence and the impact that you may have,” Alec says. “You have an extreme breadth of agency in terms of the programs you implement, how you do them and the speed at which it’s done.”
Although Alec finds his work rewarding, it comes with a significant downside: time away from family. With his Dutch wife based in The Netherlands, he is reviewing his work life. “I can’t continue to spend 10 months of the year in complex zones all over the world,” he says. Even his current rotation of being overseas for a month at a time, every six weeks, is very difficult.
With plans to move back to Australia in the next year and a half, Alec is looking at options within the organisation that require even less time away.
When asked how he thinks he will adjust to the lifestyle change of coming back home and travelling less, his attitude is relaxed. “I can feel what I need in life changing a bit, but I think it’s happening organically,” he says. “I suppose we’ll see.”