COMING from Yemen’s conflict zones, seasoned Doctors Without Borders responder Georg Gassauer thought he had seen it all — that was until he got to Jamaica and saw the western parishes ravaged by Hurricane Melissa. He was left aghast.

“I was called from the Yemen emergency to come to this emergency. I got a phone call saying, ‘Pack your bags, we’re going to Jamaica.’ So, you know, at the beginning you think, ‘It’s going to be different; it’s going to be a different environment.’ But when I got here and I went to the west of Jamaica, I just really saw destruction,” Gassauer, who is the emergency field communications manager for Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), told the Jamaica Observer in an interview last Friday.

Gassauer, who arrived days after the initial team from the MSF had been deployed in St James and its neighbouring parishes, recalled finding hillsides bare, trees leafless, and communities picking up the pieces that remained after Hurricane Melissa meandered along its destructive path through the western region of the island.

“When you look at the physical infrastructure of everything that was destroyed, it’s quite a harrowing view. It’s very different to what we’re used to, and to what we’ve seen. So we’ve worked in natural disasters before, but nothing like this,” said Gassauer, shaking head.

“Previously, we’ve dealt with outbreaks or with war-torn countries like Syria, Yemen, and all these kind of things, so that’s a different level of destruction. But here, it’s quite awe-inspiring to see what nature can actually do — the wrath of nature,“ he said.

With 17 members of MSF deployed and working alongside the Ministry of Health and Wellness since November 1, Gassauer disclosed that the agency, which specialises in outbreak control, trauma care, and many other medical fields, had been focused on restoring access to clinical facilities, trucking potable water into communities, testing ground water, and delivering supplies to health centres.

“We’re coordinating really closely with the Ministry of Health and with the emergency operational centre. The Jamaican health service is very, very competent so when they say we need supplies here, we send the supplies. If they need medical support, we provide medical support. And the intervention is meant to last until the end of December — unless, of course, there’s a public health outbreak, and then we have to reassess,” said Gassauer.

He added that one of the MSF’s most impactful acts of aid has been the restoration of the roof at Cornwall Regional Hospital, which had lost over 80 per cent of it ceiling to harsh winds.

“So this is quite unusual for us to be a funding partner. Usually we’re an implementing partner — we send emergency teams — but here we had to take a different role.

“Our major role is to make sure that the roofs of the Cornwall Regional Hospital was completed, which means they can carry on with actually cleaning up the hospital because a lot of the wards were flooded, a lot of the equipment was damaged, but now that the roof is completed they can really start rebuilding that to pre-Melissa levels,” he said as he disclosed that more projects are under way to provide other health centres with funding to fix roofs.

The the disaster specialist admitted, however, that the mission has not been easy. He told the Sunday Observer that the vast devastation of infrastructure has significantly complicated relief efforts.

“The biggest challenge that we’ve faced is infrastructure challenges, things like not being able to get to a parish or a hospital. So when you’re in the mountains in St James, for example, and then we were going up to Maroon Town, it took us two or three hours to get there simply because the roads are so damaged, the electricity poles have been falling down, roadblocks in the way.

“These things are dangerous, and it really hampers our ability to get to a place quickly enough, or it just takes up a whole day, and basically you lose time in your response,” he explained.

Despite this, Gassauer is confident that Jamaica will experience full recovery in no time, noting that what has been more striking than the magnitude of devastation is the undying spirit of the Jamaican people.

“One of the things that I found very encouraging was just the solidarity that is shown from Jamaicans. When we went to Santa Cruz what struck me was just the solidarity where you just really saw a lot of people going to the west of Jamaica, bringing food and aid packages, just seeing what they could do. I mean, it even started on the plane from London. The plane was completely packed, and people just wanted to get back and see their family, [their] relatives, and provide support.

“I don’t think anybody from the team was really expecting that Jamaica and its health services would be bouncing back as fast as they did. I think that was like the biggest initial, ‘Wow, these guys are really good. They’re very organised and they know exactly what they’re doing,’ ” he said.