Richard Wesley

I briefly passed through London to pick up my flight back down under and was lucky to catch up with a number of friends from school and work who are based over here. As an added bonus Nelson Mandela was in town to attend the unveiling and dedication of a stature in parliament square alongside Churchill and Roosevelt. It was a great little event with the mayor Ken Livingston and Prime Minister Gordon Brown also along for the photo opportunity. Mandela was strong in voice but very frail in body, so I was glad to have got my chance to lay eyes on a legend.

France is a wonderfully beautiful country with many different landscapes and a seemingly endless supply of picturesque tilled villages and grand chateaux and castles. I was very lucky to visit so many different fantastic places in a short time. Some of my favorites included the grand bulk of Chambord with its double helix central staircase, the burial site of Leonardo De Vinci , and the ruins lit by the evening light of one of King Richard’s castles, my childhood hero, and of course the legendary San Michael perched on its rocky outcrop surrounded by the sea on all sides.

With a bike at my side I managed to get in some of the sights and sounds of a few of the big cities of Euorpe. First up was Munich which was surprisingly enjoyable with a wonderful pedestrian centre, and plenty of museums and things to see and do. I wished I’d allowed more time for exploring the mountains and valleys of the Barvian Alps though, which looked like an excellent playground. It was then onto Prague with its fascinating post soviet history as well as castles, palaces, towers and of course the wonderful medieval Charles Bridge. It did however also have cobble stones on the streets, which look wonderful and lend great character to a city, but are hell to try and ride a bike on! Finally Berlin showed just how much has changed since the famous dividing wall came down. I really expected more to remain of such an amazing and historic structure, and I guess I also expected more surviving grand WWII era architecture, but alas, in both cases the symbols of evil and repression were de...

Normandy and the famous 1944 invasions of beaches of Utah, Omaha, gold, Juno and Sword were up on my list of locations to see in Europe one day. I therefore bought myself a second hand bike, caught the train out of Paris for a little near starting point and then started exploring. It was great to see some of 'Atlantic wall' and many memorials and cemeteries, though on the whole I was slightly surprised at how little remains today of the largest invasion operations in history. The weather was the only thing that did not cooperate with my outdoor tour and I became very disappointed at the northern hemisphere 'summer'. With the success of this first trip under my belt I jumped on a bus north to the flat lands of the Netherlands for a look at the coast, some remnant forest area and of course the capital Amsterdam. It was very amusing to turn up and be somewhat surprised to learn that cannabis is in fact still illegal, they simply have a bland eye policy which has some very ...

With the finish of my extra bonus mission in Darfur it was time to return to the MSF headquarters in Paris for debriefings and other finishing up items. I landed back in time to catch the last day of the famous Paris Air Show, which provided me with the maximum culture shock - the undeveloped open desert of Sudan with its mud huts contrasting with the huge new airliners, private jets and shiny military jet fighters. Even looking back on my experiences at this stage I can see that I have learnt more than I expected about the complexities of trying to help other countries deal with extreme poverty. While it is easy to see that the efforts of the last months have made a big difference to the people we helped directly, it is more difficult to pin down whether this effort was a wonderful small part of a worthwhile larger goal, or simply a small band aid on a hopeless situation. I have yet to decide for sure whether to do another mission or not, or whether perhaps to try out another ...

Closing a mission is always said to be difficult. I was lulled into a false sense of security though with great friendly staff and beautiful surroundings, and so when the last week of the mission turned a bit pear shaped it really was an interesting life experience for me. There were three things that in hindsight I wish could have gone better. The first resolved itself with the arrival from El Genina of Chloe to help with the HR side. Basically I misjudged the time it would require to count out 45 million diners for the 115 staff to be paid in the last days, and so Chloe was a huge help counting notes till the late into the night. The second was more of a bolt out of the blue with four of my staff arrested by the police for stealing. Upon further investigation of the material concerned it appears to full into three categories, items that I had indeed ‘donated’ including mainly wood and plastic rubbish, items that I clearly had not given permission, and then items I had never seen befo...

The town of Mornei where I am now living is overlooked by a wonderful little mountain, or 'jebel' as they are known here. We climbed it on Friday (our day off here being a Muslim region) but did not get great views as it was quite cloudy. I'll have to try again next week. The jebel sits to the south of the town and rises abruptly from the otherwise flat sandy landscape. To the north and west are scrubby wastelands, and on the eastern side is the dry river bed or 'wadi'. In the village kids run and play and the place looks like a large healthy village. Of course looks can be deceiving, and this village is in fact a camp which grew from 5000 residents to 75,000 refugees (or internally displaced peoples (IDP's) as they are now known) during the major Darfur violence of 2003 and 2004. Most people therefore have had their homes and livelihoods destroyed, often loosing many members of their family in the process. Armed men still wander the streets, and rapes and looti...