From rescuing refugees in the Mediterranean to completing a nine-month tour of duty in Afghanistan, Kiwi nurse Catherine Flanigan, 37, tells Joanna Wane why she walked away from a secure, conventional life in New Zealand to care for people in desperate need across the other side of the world. Almost 100,000 displaced people live in Bentiu camp, which sprawls across reclaimed swampland in South Sudan. Conditions are so poor there were outbreaks of malaria and rabies when Wellington emergency and paediatric nurse Catherine Flanigan spent six months at the camp’s only hospital in 2018.
Since that first “challenging” posting, she’s completed nine more placements working with the medical humanitarian organisation MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders) that have taken her from Syria to Belarus. Four of those assignments involved living on a search and rescue boat in the Mediterranean, plucking shipwreck survivors from the water and providing emergency medical care to refugees and migrants attempting to make the dangerous sea crossing from Libya to Europe ..
