Nobuko Kurosaki, Part 1

Striving to save lives in conflict areas

Dr. Kurosaki treats a boy who was injured in Sri Lanka's civil war. (Northern Sri Lanka, July 2009)

Nobuko Kurosaki

Born in Nagasaki Prefecture in 1957. She belonged to the handball team in high school and the "soft tennis" team in university. After graduating from the School of Medicine of Nagasaki University, she received medical training at Tokyo Women's Medical University. She then specialized in pediatric surgery at Nagasaki University. Ms. Kurosaki joined MSF in 2001. She has been dispatched as a surgeon to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Liberia, and Nigeria and other locations nine times to date, engaging in medical aid activities. She became president of MSF Japan in March 2010.

Since 2001 I have served as a surgeon for medical efforts undertaken by Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors without Borders) in conflict areas and other places. MSF is a nonprofit organization which provides international medical and humanitarian aid. Our main aim is to deliver emergency medical support to people in peril, with more than 4,700 medical personnel, such as doctors and nurses, dispatched overseas and working in 64 countries alongside 20,400 local personnel.

MSF was established in France in 1971. The Japanese branch was founded in 1992. Japan sent 55 personnel to 24 nations in 2009 and provided medical services a total of 75 times.

My first assignment was in 2001, in a public hospital in the eastern part of Sri Lanka. It was a large general hospital with more than 800 beds, but it lacked surgeons because of the civil war that had continued since 1983. Two surgeons from MSF were therefore in charge of four surgical wards, with about 160 beds, and an operating room.

A month after I began working there, a ten-year-old girl was hospitalized one night due to abdominal pain. It was an emergency involving her pancreas. Even in Japan, which is well-equipped for such an operation, it takes about three hours to perform this surgery. My colleagues told me, "Nobuko, we have you, a specialist in pediatric surgery, so let's perform the operation soon." All other operations scheduled for the afternoon were canceled.

After the operation, I left the room and the girl's mother, about to cry, approached me. The man next to her told me, "She's crying because she can't speak English and she's unable to express her gratitude to you." In that moment I was moved by the words "Thank you," and I felt happier to be a doctor than ever before, helping to save people's lives.

Since then, I have been to a variety of areas. In January 2003, late one night, I got a call: "There's a mission that's perfect for you. Would you be able to leave within the next two weeks?" A few days later, I became part of a mission to Iraq. We first went to Belgium, where we prepared for the war before it broke out. During this time, not knowing when the war might start, we underwent training, such as treatment to counter weapons of mass destruction. We were standing by, in Jordan, ready to help, but just after the war began, two of our colleagues went missing. The members of MSF, including the doctors who had already begun serving in Iraq, were forced to evacuate. Before I had the chance to help, I returned to Japan that April.

After that, I went to Indonesia twice after the tsunami catastrophe there and I provided surgical treatment and emergency operations for the wounded in wars in Liberia, Nigeria, and other areas. In Somalia, which I visited in April 2008, the country was in a shambles. I worked at a hospital in the desert for three weeks. It was a dangerous site, and each day we had many patients due to bombings or shootings. More than half of them were young children and women. I remember one girl, among some twenty patients carried in, who had been hit in the head by a bullet. She had already stopped breathing by the time she arrived at the hospital. After all the emergency operations had been performed on the other victims, she was still in the corner of the room, covered with a blanket, waiting for her family to come for her.

In the operations we perform in conflict areas, we try to save as many lives as possible with limited equipment and medicine. The local people accept that this is their fate and feel gratitude for simply surviving and going on with faint hopes for the future. I think how the people will continue to spend day after day in danger, but all we can do is perform our duty as doctors to the best of our ability.